Untold: Opus Dei - The Retreat, Ep. 2: Ten Long Days

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Emily’s twin sister spirals after going on a Goenka retreat, and she’s not the only one. Madison Marriage hears multiple accounts of terror, hallucinations and psychosis. Was meditation just the catalyst that unleashed psychological problems? Or did this network of silent meditation retreats actually cause their suffering?For support or more information about adverse meditation experiences, take a look at the Cheetah House website.We also spoke to Miguel Farias and Jonny Say to corroborate claims in the podcast about adverse meditation experiences. You can find out more about Farias’s work here, and Say’s here.If you are in need of urgent mental health support, please contact your local emergency services or reach out to a mental health helpline, such as the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US or Samaritans in the UK.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek support if you need it. The gong bangs at 4 a.m. It's still dark outside, but you get up and get dressed. With the others, you head into the meditation hall. You try not to make eye contact. Talking is forbidden. Volunteer directs you to find a spot.

You sit and begin. Your goal is to focus your mind. Your back hurts. Your knees hurt. And you're hungry. They don't serve dinner here. You've been here three days and you have seven more. Yesterday you asked about leaving.

But leaving is a bad idea, they say. You're not sleeping as much as you usually do. Actually, you can't sleep, no matter how hard you try. You're exhausted. You don't really know how you're going to sit and meditate for over 10 hours one more day. You're at this retreat because you've been looking for something to relieve whatever feelings you're having. Something that's not pharmaceutical. something safe.

And at the very least, it's kept you from looking at your phone. They took your phone away when you arrived at the centre. After breakfast, you go back to meditating for three more hours, followed by a lunch break and then more meditating. Then some more, then some more. You're taught to scan your body slowly, up, and down, feeling every single sensation, laser-focusing your attention. This goes on for hours and hours.

In the evening, everyone gathers around while an instructor loads a videotape into a VCR. The screen shows an older man with an open, friendly face. He sits cross-legged on the floor. The video is grainy and the audio is not the best, but you can't. but you can hear the teachings. The man on the TV screen is called Satya Narayana Gwanker. To get the best result of your stay here, you have to work very hard,

diligently, ardently, patiently, but persistently, continuously, it is your own heart, hard work which will give you the best fruits of your stay here. From the Special Investigations team at the Financial Times, this is The Retreats. The Retreat. The Retreat. The Retreat. You have to work out your own salvation, your own liberation.

None else can do that for you. Episode 2. 10 long days. In the last episode, I met Emily. And I learned how her family became fractured after she was drawn into the Gwenca organisation. How she went on retreat after retreat. How it robbed Emily of her day-to-day life and her grip on reality. How it nearly broke her. After hearing her story, the big question for me was,

how unusual was her experience? Were there others? Like her. I started to probe deeper, to look for others who'd been to retreats. Among the blog posts and YouTube videos of people saying how much they recommend the retreats, I began to find more and more accounts that said the opposite. The people I found weren't just in the UK. I talked to people from all over the world.

Australia, America, Sweden, France, New Zealand. there wasn't much in common between these individuals. Some of them came from wealthy backgrounds, like Emily and her twin sister. Some had nothing. Some were well established in their careers, and some hadn't even gotten their first job yet. But what emerged was a pattern,

where people from all walks of life signed up to a Gwenco retreat in the hope of self-improvement to help relieve stress or anxiety, or simply to experience something new, to challenge themselves. Instead, they said, their brains were ripped apart.

Being in a retreat, there's something about the absolute silence. You know, I felt very, very anxious. I was scared of what was happening. I thought it was if I couldn't trust myself. So I was kind of like toppled over on the floor and crying and all these people just walked by me. And it was a horrible experience. I was extremely scared.

I've never been so afraid in my life. And like literally felt like a hole of my chest had just exploded. And my body started involuntarily shaking. Sometimes when you meditate, thoughts come up. And it was like this voice was like, maybe you would be better off dead. I interviewed nearly two dozen people.

There was Sky from Massachusetts. I think people would describe me as someone. who's kind of like daring and probably strong. Sky first heard about Gwenka retreats while studying for a degree in social work. At the time, she says there was a lot of excitement about the role of meditation in mental health intervention. And she herself was dealing with mild anxiety and depression.

Some of it might have been work-related, some of it might have been related to childhood, and some of it just kind of how I'm wired. I was sort of looking forward to where this would take me, you know, with all the purported benefits. It was actually her doctor who suggested she try meditating to help with her symptoms. He recommended she applied to a nearby Gwenka Center. Sky filled out the application form, which asked a few basic questions about her physical and mental health. But when she found out she was accepted, she was still quite anxious about going.

I was kind of terrified, but he wouldn't be recommending this if it wasn't really a good fit for me. And also just kind of being an adventurous person, that part of me was really excited about going. And then there was Nick from Alabama. I grew up in kind of like an industrial suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Nick said he got into meditating in his 20s. He used to do about 40 minutes a day. He felt it helped him gain some clarity of mind. Like just a little more crisp, just a little more calm.

I think it was helping to some degree with the anxious patterns of my mind. He signed up to his first Guenca retreat in Jessup, Georgia. There was Michael from Britain. He signed up to a Guenca centre in Herefordshire, deep in the British countryside. I felt like I was emerging from an illusion, not that I was heading into an hallucination. And there were others. There was Neals from Denmark, John from Sydney,

Jenny from Southern California. There was something about the self-denial and isolation of a Gwenko retreat that appealed to all of them. I thought I was doing this really profound and deep thing and mystical experience, you know. All of them entered these retreats, hoping this was going to be a positive and maybe even transformative experience,

but few of them had an understanding of just what exactly they'd be doing. It felt mysterious. I think day one was kind of okay. It was sort of exciting. The things that are really kind of stuck into my mind were like turning over my keys and my wallet and my phone, you know, and kind of like taking the plunge into, I don't know what I was getting into. They sat still for hours with Gwanka's voice surrounding them.

And as the hours stacked up, each of them did have gratifying moments. I experienced a lot of peace and stillness in my mind and feeling a connectivity with everyone around me and just serenity. I was feeling tremendously energized. It wasn't relaxing. It was like being wired. So you're filled with all these positive emotions,

you know. I suddenly felt an enormous wave of inner peace, total peace of mind, total quiet, total relaxation, total bliss for about an hour on day three. But each in different ways and at different

times in their experience started to feel something unsettling. At first I just began to feel afraid. I just started to feel fear. I started to feel these waves of panic. I couldn't sit still. I was in panic. I was freaking out. And I was like, oh my God, what's happening? They told me that the more they meditated throughout the retreat, the more they had difficulty sleeping. And that cycle happened over and over again. And then And sometimes that kind of nodding off and then startling back awake would shift into just feeling absolutely terrified. And that terror wasn't attached to anything.

It was kind of like a nightmare or a bad trip. They were all silently suffering. Despite this, the Guanka volunteers would press them all to continue. Some of them sought advice from the teacher at the end of the day. And so I told him, you know, like, I'm crying, I'm going through all these experiences. And his response to me was, it's just another sensation. That was his response. The teacher just did not have the skills to really receive what I was going through.

Literally everything I was saying, she just kept responding, like, just do the technique. And it wasn't just the teachers at each center who told them to keep going. Guenka's teachings gave quite clear guidance on seeing the 10 days through. This is a very serious job that you are doing. It is actually a deep surgical operation of your own mind. Deep surgical operation. Gawanka talks about how doing Vipasana or taking this course is kind of like doing brain surgery. And if you leave in the middle of the course,

that you're kind of like leaving when your skull is still open. It was just stuck into my mind that if I leave without finishing, whatever happens to me is going to be more terrifying than if I just, you know, stick it out. The whole process of cutting the wound and taking the pus out is unpleasant. You have to face it. Accept it. bravely. And every unpleasant experience that you have,

bear it smilingly, because it is for your good. They all felt like they shouldn't leave, or in some cases, perhaps they couldn't leave. And they began to have severe breakdowns, some more dire than others. I finally lost it completely. They got the assistant teacher,

and he came to my room, and at that point I was sort of believing 100% in my hallucination and he was half a reptile in his face. So one side of his face he was like a lizard or something like that. And at this point I had no idea that I was hallucinating or dreaming or whatever. For me this was real. This was my reality. There is this half-lissid creature. sitting in my room trying to convince me to come back to the meditation hall.

My life shattered. My life shattered into a million pieces. I was so dissociated at the time. It was like being stuck in like a bad psychedelic trip that you can't get out of. It just keeps going. Sky nosedived after she finished her first retreat. Yeah, I got to the point, you know, after about 50, days of not really sleeping, where I just couldn't go on anymore. I remember lying in bed. I was staying

with my mom because I was struggling so much and kind of having this realization that, you know, like, maybe the only way to kind of get through this is to die. After realizing she had suicidal ideation, Sky asked her therapist to refer her to a psychiatric unit. I was there for, I think, seven nights. Michael didn't make it to the end of his first retreat. On day eight, he ended up being removed from the Guenka Center in handcuffs by the police before being taken to hospital. When the ambulance team arrived, I wouldn't cooperate with them.

I just said, no, I'm not going with you. And the only people who can move you against your will are the police. Michael remembers being under police supervision at the hospital. and while he waited to see the on-duty psychiatrist, he says he was subsumed by a roiling primal fear, that it was like he was dying and being reborn every 90 seconds. This went on for hours. I couldn't really determine what was happening.

It was very difficult for me to understand what was real and what was not. Of all the people I interviewed, a few of them, like Sky, and Michael, had experiences during or after an initial Gwenco retreat. But for most of these people, it was only after several retreats that something seemed to go wrong. And when it went wrong, it went really wrong. Like with Sarah. That's after the break. Do you want something to eat? It's kind of lunchtime.

Yeah. We've made some really nice vendors and to you. I met her at my god, I was expecting. I thought I might be like a biscuit. No, please, we've got those of it. I met Sarah in Oxfordshire, where she lived in a sweet little house with a roommate. Sarah is Emily's identical twin sister. You met Emily in the last episode.

You might recall the twins grew up playing music together in a beautiful house with gardens in the English countryside. Sarah seems a bit more introverted than her twin sister, but is a kind of. and warm host. We sat down to do the interview in a music room next to her cello. Nowadays, Sarah doesn't give off party animal vibes, but she pulls out a photo of herself

at a house party during her student years where she's covered in body paint, wearing a boob tube, and grinning at the camera. She looks like she's the life and soul. She tells stories about when she was in college, the old her. just have these big parties in our house.

Just like lots of fun themes, sort of dressing up. Oh, so there was one party which was like, Desert Island themed. I went as Ariel from the Tempice. Sarah had tons of fun at university, but she was feeling a little lost after finishing her degree.

She was also struggling to find a cure for a debilitating nerve pain in her arms. She thought meditation might help, and Emily, her twilight. twin sister, recommended going to a Gwenka retreat. The retreat centre in Herefordshire was peaceful and she was pleased to be around a big group of people her own age. As the course progressed, she found that amazing things started happening to her mind.

I remember to find it quite incredible what would happen if you observe, like if you stay that concentrated for a long time. It kind of felt like my mind was becoming very clear, very sharp. and I felt like I was going into a state of wine that was quite above ordinary. The third day I started to like see patterns. Actually, we about see patterns? It was kind of like with my eyes closed

and my field of vision, there were just like all these like geometric kind of patterns, like shapes and things moving. And then when I went outside, everything looked really geometric. Everything was really, really colourful. Sarah achieved what the organisation says is possible. she was able to reach a higher spiritual plane,

one that led to, quote, increased awareness, non-delusion, self-control and peace. It's basically like a sober psychedelic experience. It was very, very mentally altering, and it was as if I'd taken psychedelic drugs for 10 days. And something else amazing happened to Sarah during the retreat. Her nerve pain completely disappeared. So it did kind of feel like I kind of cleansed that was benefiting my body as well.

So that was kind of quite amazing. I was like, oh wow, you know, I seemed to really be responding well to this practice. By the fourth day, Sarah felt overwhelmed by emotion and broke down sobbing. I left the hall and I went and sat outside and then the helper came and was like, you know, are you okay? and I was just like, it's just all a lot, you know, and she was like, you know, but just, you know, just go in and just carry on, carry on with meditation and just let the tears fall. When she came out of the other side of the 10-day program, Sarah felt like a new person.

I felt like I kind of went to a different planet. I don't know if that makes sense. I kind of felt like I could see through all the problems in the world. And I just felt like my mind had been so, so transformed and I had like ended in some completely new way of like seeing the world but the fact she suddenly saw the world differently meant she also viewed her family in a new light

back at home things weren't the same around them afterwards basically I felt like I didn't trust my family more I was almost kind of convinced that they were like bad and that this was the way to be good and it kind of made me feel like feeling very euphoric, but also very at odds with everything in my life.

Sarah was job hunting while living at home, but she had also started meditating for three hours a day. And soon enough, Sarah signed up to another retreat in France, and then another, and then another. She became a server as well, working for weeks at a retreat. time as a volunteer at the Guenka retreats. Once I'd started the whole thing, I felt like I couldn't really function without it. I honestly just felt like I had to keep doing it.

It always sounds like an addiction. Yeah, it is like an addiction. And it's even more confusing because they portray it as like this ultimate antithesis to addiction. Like they say that you're becoming more independent and more self-sufficient by practicing meditation. But actually the opposite is to. true and I think it's like anything that's very mentally altering, it has the potential to become

addictive. An addiction to meditation. That's what Sarah told me she had. After nearly three years of meditating, serving, traveling and struggling to sleep, something in Sarah's mind finally snapped. She hit rock bottom. This was the retreat that broke her. It was January, 2021. I felt like something in my kind of psychological structure had been really just broken and really damaged. For a lot of people, meditating for hours can bring old memories to the surface. Sometimes those memories are traumatic. But for Sarah, something else was happening. I basically felt like I didn't actually have any of my own trauma to surface,

and it was kind of all this trauma was surfacing from, I can only think of it as like from other lifetimes. I felt like I was in a war zone, or I was like witnessing someone being raped, or I was like a perpetrator and I was like killing people and that was kind of what was going on in my brain. Sounds horrible. Yeah, yeah, it was really, really horrible. Over the next six months, Sarah spiraled out of control.

By the summer of 2021, she was in full-blown psychosis. Her memory of these weeks is hazy because she was so far gone. Here is what she does remember. Basically I was like hallucinating for like probably like three weeks straight and I was convinced that I was like go to hell

I'm going to go to these places where all this like torture and I was actually convinced at one point that I was going to die and that I was going to go to a place where these horrible things happen like all the time I was just basically completely delusional Kate

Sarah's mind And Stephen, Sarah's dad. Say Sarah was only sleeping for two hours a night. By day, she seemed to be living a nightmare. It was like a terrible repeat from when Emily fell ill from too much meditation. Only worse. Here's Kate. It was horrific.

She would be wracked by these terrible sobbing fits. You know, we'd try and take her out for a walk to try and relax her. She was so keyed up. And we were trying to walk around the fields with her. And she's suddenly become vulsed with crying. And immobile. I couldn't move. She's a big, strong girl.

She'd just stop. I should be like this. Kate began to fear that Sarah would take her own life. She hid all the medication in the house and kept it under lock and gaug. Kate became Sarah's appointed guardian to manage doctor's appointments and to ensure she couldn't stop pile of painkillers. She and Stephen slept in shifts to make sure one of them could keep an eye on Sarah at all times. By this point, Emily had come home to try and help care for Sarah. Emily was still

meditating all the time as well. But seeing the distress her twin sister was in, was the final trigger for her. She had begun to realise that the meditation retreats were not helping either of them, that they were, potentially, the root cause of their pain. Kate, Stephen and Emily struggled to keep Zara stable. There were other crises where she'd be thrashing. We were sitting on the sofa over there, you know, trying to hold her down.

Why would you need to hold her? down. We were just afraid she was going to hurt herself or hurt us. She was murderous as well as suicidal. She'd pick up a knife. I remember her smashing a plate full of food on the floor over there. And just the threats, you know, I'm going to kill myself, I'm going to kill myself. She kept asking me to help her kill herself. And I had to say, no, I can't. I can't. do that. Sarah's episodes got progressively worse that summer. Just like with Emily,

Kate was constantly watching over Sarah, hoping she didn't hurt herself. There was one night that she won't ever forget. She was so sick and her eyes were like this. And she was making awful, awful noises like

growling, shrieking, whoops, animal guttural noises and just screams. And it was like, you know, it just felt like a really bad 1970s BBC horror movie, you know, in the asylum. And this was my beautiful daughter in my house. This was our family. It was just shocking, deeply, deeply shocking. That night, in desperation, the family called an ambulance. After a nightmarish few weeks, they finally got the help they needed.

Their local doctor put Sarah on a combination of medications that helped her to sleep after years of sleep deprivation. Slowly, Sarah started to re-emerge from the fog of the previous three years. In the daytime, she watched trashy TV shows. At night, she slept for 12 hours straight. Crucially, she stopped meditating. But she seemed damaged. Her cognitive function seemed slower.

She struggled to do things that had previously been easy, like turning pages of music in time while her mum played. but slowly she seemed to improve. She started singing again with her twin sister. More than two years later, Kate still worries desperately about Sarah's mental well-being. Sometimes she's fine. Sometimes I see the girl I used to know in her.

We had a lovely Christmas. She came home, she slept well. It was like old times. We were all laughing around together and playing games. It was wonderful. And then suddenly she crumbles and she's this little vulnerable, lost person. So now I was convinced. I'd talked to so many people like Sarah and Emily

who'd had severe mental health issues during or after a Gwanka retreat. So many people who said intense meditation had caused them serious harm. But why? And how? What was happening to these people? Was there a clinical reason people were coming out of these retreats so broken? Were the people I interviewed always prone to mental health issues? Was meditation just the catalyst that unleashed these problems?

Or did meditation cause them? Hi, Willoughby. How are you? Hi. Good. I tracked down Willoughby, Britain, who is widely considered one of the global experts on meditation-related difficulties. Willoughby is the founder of a non-profit organisation linked to Brown University that's been offering support to people experiencing meditation-related challenges for over a decade. It's called Cheetah House. Her organisation has around 150 appointments every month to provide advice to people in crisis.

Willoughby really knows this subject inside out, starting with her own personal experience. I got into it for myself to manage my own stress, anxiety and trauma. Meditation helped Willoughby at first, and she became a kind of meditation evangelist. But she began to experience something that can happen to committed meditators, something called dissociation. Things like having your body dissolve, not feeling like you exist, feeling like you're floating or like located somewhere else other than behind your eyes, having kind of hyper empathy, like you don't have a lot of boundaries in terms of other people's emotions.

After her own personal experience with intense meditation, Willoughby decided to study meditation and what it does to people. Willoughby told me I should think about meditation as a form of cortical arousal, something that stimulates the brain, almost like a drug. So if you think about other drugs that people take to enhance their attention or their alertness, like coffee, amphetamines, cocaine, Ritalin, those are all stimulants. And they have a sweet spot that if you take them, you know, you have better concentration. You can focus.

You're more awake. But if you take too much, then you start to have anxiety, panic, and insomnia. And probably in some cases, psychosis if you take enough. This sounds a lot like an overdose. Obviously, the dose is a big deal. So the higher the dose, the more likely you're going to see difficulties. From their research, Willoughby and her team have found that people respond to meditation

differently. For example, they found that meditation can sometimes help with sleep at first. But when people start meditating for more than 30 minutes a day, it can have the opposite effect. And so it can be very confusing for people, especially when for a long time meditation was relaxing or calming or helping or help. their minds. When they start to develop anxiety, they often start meditating more in order to calm down more. And then, of course, it gets worse. And so they get more anxiety, so they meditate

more. Willoughby is describing what Sarah told me about, essentially an addiction cycle. You begin meditating to help your mental state. And the process of meditating allows you to feel as though you are helping your mental well-being. So you meditate more. But the meditation in part is what starts causing new issues. As the problem grows, so does the amount of meditation. It starts to spiral. The cure becomes the sickness.

Willoughby sees it all the time. Most of the people that Willoughby sees are having issues from intense doses of meditation. But some people, she said, have a reaction from the smallest dose of meditation. We're also seeing problems from people who are only doing daily practice at home, less than an hour a day. So we also see that. We also see problems from app use.

She's talking about apps like Headspace and calm. So it's important to say that if you're doing a low dose, it doesn't mean that that's 100% safe. Willoughby's research findings are not universally popular. In some corners of the meditation community, she's despised. Oh, yes. I've received over a thousand emails from people who have all sorts of things to say about me, about my research, about how I'm wrong, how I'm terrible, how I'm evil. I've been called a false profit.

I've been threatened with lawsuits. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I get it all. But Willoughby's not deterred. She believes in her research. And she does have a particular concern about intensive meditation retreats,

especially those that don't tailor their programs to suit individual needs. If you have a super high dose, if you have a lot of people and a few teachers, if you have a one-size-fits-all, everybody's doing the same practice and there's no way to modify it according to each person, then that's also a really kind of a recipe for disaster. And then when people raise a red flag and say they're encountering difficulties while meditating.

The kind of most common response that most people will get from a meditation teacher does not help, which is basically keep meditating. Whatever happens, keep meditating is almost always the answer. Speaking to Willoughby, it becomes clear that there is a problem here. And the lack of consensus around this means there's also a lack of support systems on many retreats, which makes them particularly dangerous. It's so common that meditators get blamed for their experience. You know, it's never the practice.

It's always the meditator. They didn't do it right. They had a pre-existing condition. They weren't adequately prepared. There's so many ways that they get blamed by their meditation teachers, but also by their doctors and their therapists. What Willoughby was saying, all checked out with the personal experiences I'd heard. But I wanted to sense check what she'd told me with other meditation experts. To find out to what extent her views were an outlawful.

liar in her field. It turns out they aren't. I found many experts who corroborated her findings about intense and prolonged meditation practices. The experts I spoke to said that meditation-related challenges are real, serious, and can happen to anyone. This seemed to be widely accepted. The experts said it didn't matter whether or not you had a previous. experience of trauma or a mental health condition or whether you are experiencing a major life event. Intensive meditation could unleash dramatic problems in an individual. Even those who believed they were completely stable without any prior warning that this was possible. And those affected suffered real harm as a result. So the next question was

how far does this harm go? And what's the ultimate consequence if it's not addressed? Regardless of whether she had something going on or not at the end of the day, nobody helped her. So even if she had mental illness and we didn't know and she just, you know, it was never shared with anyone, nobody helped her. Regardless of what was going on. That's next time on the retreat. The Retreat is the first season from Untold, a new Financial Times investigative podcast.

It is produced by The Financial Times with Goat Rodeo. The series lead producers are Rebecca Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Madison Marriage, writing by me, Megan Adolsky and Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright. Executive producers for the Financial Times are Tofer Foreheads, and Cheryl Bromley. Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Adolsky.

Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive Once Answers by Kaleen. Additional music from Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and production assistants from Paul Afflallow, Joshua Gabbat Doyon, Petros Guillaume Passis, Andrew Georgiades, Sittath Venkata Ramakrishna and Laura Clark. Thanks also to Alastamaki. If you've been affected by anything in this series, there are some useful resources highlighted in the show notes. And if you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison.com.

thanks to you for listening and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me