Soulmates (24 page)

One of the nymphets, holding a golden lacquered tray with two mugs on it, appeared in the hidden doorway Yoni had come through. She knelt between Janus and me. Janus took a mug, and I followed suit. I peered inside mine. Whatever was in there looked dark and murky. The nymphet bowed at us, her tray never moving, and left the room again.

“Congratulations, Dana. This is your ordination ceremony. This does not mean that your work here is done. On the contrary. The real work of your journey is just beginning.” Yoni's eyes sparkled, but his mouth was set in a serious line. I could see the wrinkles in his brow tighten. He nodded at Janus, who drank from his mug. I took a small sip from mine. And instead of fear, I felt pride.

Some part of me knew it was completely fucked. That everything I had experienced over the past few weeks was potentially dangerous mumbo jumbo based on a foundational lie. That the
real
work I was supposed to be doing wasn't even going well: I was only half a step closer to finding out what had happened to Ethan than I had been when I arrived at Zuni.

But another part of me knew I
had
done real work here. The things I told Lo were completely true. For the first time in memory, I didn't feel angry. I wasn't cursing fate and the hand I'd been dealt. I wasn't blaming my mother—or Ethan—for everything that had gone wrong in my life. And I was grateful for that.

Janus took another big gulp from his mug, so I did the same. It was only after this second gulp that I really tasted the brew, which was like baker's chocolate infused with twigs and snot. The aftertaste lingered in my mouth for a moment and I almost threw up. I wondered if it was poisoned.

But when I looked over at Janus, he continued to take shots of the brew, making faces like he'd just had a jigger of cheap tequila. Aside from those faces, he looked fine. This didn't seem like some Jonestown scenario with cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. I took a few more little sips of my drink: big enough that I could get the liquid down, small enough to keep me from gagging.

After Janus and I finished our drinks, Yoni said, “Lie down,” and we did. We used the pillows to prop our heads up. “Close your eyes.”

I felt Yoni's hands gently combing my hair. His nails were surprisingly long, and his touch maternal. After a while, my limbs felt heavy, and my stomach began to roil. Fuck, what if this
was
a Jonestown scenario? It would be too late. The fear was so intense that it short-circuited my brain; the thoughts kept bumping into one another like a roomful of toddlers learning to walk. My heart beat a fast, syncopated track. The pain got worse and I turned over to my side and curled up in the fetal position.

“You may need to use the troughs for your eruptions,” Yoni said. “Vomiting is a common side effect of the ayahuasca journey you are on.”

I looked over at Janus, who was doubled over his trough, retching his life out. Just watching him caused me to start heaving, and as my lunch came back up the same mantra kept
repeating over and over again in my head, erected in big neon letters that flashed on and off:
Pride goeth before a fall
.

When I was empty I lay down again, and the mantra disappeared. I started to see vibrant colors burst across my brain. Pink and then green, blue and then black. Black black black. I imagined myself groping around in the dark, feeling for some sort of exit, but my hands were slippery. I found a hatch in the ceiling and I opened it. My mother fell out. “I'm in pain, I'm in pain,” she kept wailing. “Can't you see? I'm in pain.”

I picked her up and comforted her. She was the size of a baby. It was suddenly so clear to me that she was nasty because she was hurting. I felt revolutionary empathy for her, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I cuddled her until she stopped wailing and fell asleep.

I started groping around in the dark for another entry. I found ornate French doors, and when I opened them I fell into a garden. Birds chirped in my ears, and gargantuan butterflies flapped their huge wings so that I felt a fresh breeze on my face. I wandered through the garden until I found an open field. I sat down and started picking cornflowers, then wove them into a daisy chain and put them on my head. Beth appeared next to me. She was wearing a white nightgown, like the ones we wore as children. I wove a daisy chain for her, too. She thanked me. “I'm so proud of you,” she said, before she floated away. I waved good-bye to her as she disappeared into the sky.

I got up and kept walking until I came to a pond. I looked down and saw my reflection, but I also saw Ethan's face. “Dana,” Ethan said, “you don't need to worry about me. You've done enough for me in the earthly world. You were a good wife. I
couldn't live up to our sacred vows. I'm sorry.” The water in the lake rippled in the butterfly wind, but Ethan's face remained clear. “My spirit is at rest,” he said. “Please don't disturb my spirit. I've found perfect peace.”

I turned around to see if Ethan was behind me, but there was no one there. I looked back at the water. Ethan's reflection was gone. In his place were two otters. They floated on their backs while holding hands. I knew that these otters were Ethan and Amaya, and in that moment I released all my jealousy toward them. I was so happy their spirits were at peace that I started to cry.

I saw Janus drifting above me on a cloud. “Do you understand what you are seeing?” he asked, reclining on his white puffy chaise. “Kai and Amaya brought each other to the physical brink. They were worshiping an Aztec goddess of death, the obsidian butterfly. She told them to prove their love to her by spilling their blood on sacred soil. That's why they fled the Homestead. The butterfly has claimed them. But their spirits are free as the breeze.” With that, he floated off into the distance. He got smaller and smaller and smaller until he was one with the sky.

And then I heard Yoni's voice in the background. He kept saying my name: Dana, Dana, Dana. Like a chant. Was this only happening in my mind? I felt him putting his hands on my forehead. They were cool to the touch. My face was hot. Yoni started speaking.

“I want to tell you a story about a pair of coyotes, a male and a female. They lived blissfully together in the Mezquital Valley, feasting on the abundant crops and sleeping in the cool highland
air with the rest of their pack. The male was the alpha of the group, a natural leader. And the female had the glossiest, healthiest coat of any coyote in the valley.” As Yoni spoke, I saw those coyotes saunter in front of me and lie down together, nuzzled into each other. “One day, those coyotes were blessed with a single pup.” A sweet baby coyote appeared on the scene, walked over to his parents, and snuggled into his mother.

“Coyotes are unusual in the animal kingdom: the raising of children isn't just the mother's job. While the mother nurses her young, the father protects them both and brings food from the outside world. But this mother coyote got spooked; she heard strange noises at night in the valley, noises she never heard before. Instead of looking to her mate for safety, she fled with the pup.” The mother and child ran off, leaving a lone coyote wailing at the moon.

“The mother and child were never the same. They wandered in the wilderness for twenty-seven years. The mother died, and her son had no one. His journey was meandering and without purpose. His father finally sent an envoy to look for him, a young female coyote who would bring him home. After a long journey, she found him crying alone by a stream that was almost dry. The young coyote returned him to his pack, where he belonged.” I pictured the group of coyotes trotting happily into the distance and smiled.

“Dana, do you understand what I am telling you?” Yoni said, his cool hands shifting off my forehead to my temples. He was so close I could smell his breath, a pure peppermint waft. “Kai—your Ethan—he had to come home to his pack.
He was not being nourished by a world he didn't belong in. I sent Amaya, my most precious companion, to find him. She brought him home.”

I opened my mouth to speak. I hadn't said a word since I began my ayahuasca journey, and my voice was a deep, unfamiliar croak. “But what about me? Hadn't he made a new home with me?” Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.

“My child. Your streambed was dry. Don't you see that now? You weren't being nourished by your surroundings, were you?” Yoni started to stroke my hair again.

As he lulled me, I had to admit I wasn't. I hadn't been happy with Ethan even before he left with Amaya. I had to acknowledge that now. We had been connected once, but that connection had frayed and frayed. And I certainly hadn't been nourished by anything or anyone in the years since our break. “No. I wasn't fulfilled.”

“And you weren't your true self. I can see that now. I can see that true self shining through after all the work you've done here.” He kneaded my temples gingerly as he said this. “Amaya had a darkness within her. She hid it so successfully that I didn't see it until it was too late. I should have sent another envoy to embrace Ethan. Their bond became tainted just before they left the Homestead. I should never have sent them off into the hills. But I thought they would work themselves out and return to the fold.” Now he was crying. I felt his teardrops sprinkle my forehead. They dripped down my face like a pleasant rain. “This was all fated. Don't you understand? Nothing happens for no reason. The cycle of events that began forty
years ago with Saffie has culminated in your arrival. You are the true gift to the Homestead.”

In my mind I saw a red door open, a golden light glowing behind it.

Yoni lay down next to me and whispered in my ear: “You are meant to be.” He kissed me on the mouth. It was the most tender kiss I'd ever received. I could see his lips as a cloud in the sky: pillowy and pure white. He touched my breasts and I felt his power burrowing into my heart. I saw a giant snake, which turned into a slide, which turned into a rope, which coiled around an anchor, which led into a boat that floated out to sea. I floated with the boat until I felt something touch my shoulder.

I opened my eyes. The troughs had disappeared, as had Lama Yoni. In place of my trough was a tray that held a tea set and an envelope.

Janus poured us two cups of tea. He handed me a cup. “Do you know why Yoni named me Janus?” he asked. I shook my head no. “In Greek mythology, Janus is the doorway. He is the patron saint of beginnings and of changes. That's my job here. I welcome guests to stay at the retreat, but I also welcome the ordained by taking an ayahuasca journey with each of them. You learn so much on each journey, it is the greatest gift any member of our tribe could ever receive.”

“I do feel transformed,” I told him. “I never thought I would take a journey like this. I have never felt so free, so empty, in my entire life.”

“That is the power of ayahuasca. We use it as an ordination rite because it is truly transformative. In observing your journey,
Yoni has been given your new spirit name. It will reflect what he saw when you were experiencing your deep soul change.”

Janus slid the envelope toward me. I picked it up. It was soft and pliable, unlike any paper product I had felt. I opened it. Printed in ornate calligraphy was the name Devi.

“Ah, Devi,” said Janus approvingly. “This is an extremely special name. Maya Devi is the mother of the Buddha. This means that Yoni sees you as an awesome creative force. Mothers birthed the whole world.” Janus looked a little awestruck. It all made sense now. This was how I was meant to be a mother: not by having Ethan's children, but by becoming a more nurturing soul.

Ethan's spirit was at rest. I knew this much. It all made sense now. He and Amaya had been playing some kind of dangerous game that she had initiated, and they couldn't survive it. Her negative energy had severed the deep connection they had to the spiritual world, and nothing could bring that back. Whatever happened to him—and everyone else—was fated. I had come here to revivify my life. Not his. All my petty grievances, once so important to me, had now dissipated into the ether. That was why I reacted so strongly to Lama Yoni that first time I saw him, years ago in New York: he was showing me my soul, but I wasn't ready to accept the true me. But now I was finally reborn.

“It's time for you to go to your new quarters,” Janus said. “Your things have been removed from your old room. You will find your robes—the robes of the ordained—waiting for you.”

A pretty young woman appeared again. I followed her back down the rich purple halls, and into my new life.

The Buddhist Predator of the New Mexico Desert

Did a guru's actions lead to a young couple's death?

BY LUCINDA CROSLEY

The guru's voice on the police recording is matter-of-fact. “Two of the teachers at my retreat have gone missing,” he says. “Their names are Kai Powell and Amaya Walters. They didn't show up for their class this morning, and someone saw them go off into the mountains.” The call alone was notable. The Sagebrush County Sheriff's Office had never heard from the guru directly before, even though he owned two upscale yoga retreats in the middle of the county's empty, arid land.

The charismatic guru's real name is John Brooks, though he's known to his followers as Yoni. His main retreat is called Zuni. It's popular among wealthy New Age types, particularly in Silicon Valley. Yoni's ancillary retreat is called the Homestead, and is more expensive and exclusive—it's invite-only, and its residents are teachers at the Zuni Retreat and obsessive acolytes of the guru. The
Homestead's guests stay for months at a time, draining their fortunes in a never-ending quest for spiritual salvation.

The authorities, led by Sagebrush County sheriff Matt Lewis, started looking for Powell and Walters immediately after they got the call. Camping in the mountains is illegal because the landscape is so barren. Locals say it's filled with bad spirits and scorpions.

It took searchers a month to find Powell and Walters, and it was too late. Their desiccated bodies were found on the hard ground in a remote cave, a sharpened piece of obsidian between them. Autopsies revealed stab wounds deep enough to nick bone. The placement and depth of those wounds led the county coroner to suspect that what went on between Powell and Walters was a murder-suicide. But the corpses had deteriorated so much that it was impossible to make a definitive judgment based on the forensic autopsy alone.

From all accounts, Ethan Powell was a gentle soul who was so devoted to Buddhism (or at least Lama Yoni's fractured interpretation of it) that he would not kill a mosquito even as it was sucking his blood. According to a former follower of Yoni's, Powell was also deeply devoted to Walters. He left his wife to follow her to the Zuni Retreat, and the pair made popular yoga videos together under the name When Two Become One. Now that they're dead, watching these videos is a macabre and intimate experience. Powell and Walters do not break eye contact, no matter what yogic contortions their bodies are making.

The journey that ended in Powell's and Walters's deaths began forty years ago and a thousand miles away from New Mexico in San Francisco. It's a winding road filled with alleged sexual assault, secrecy, spiritual malpractice, hidden family ties, and a body count. For the first time, an ex-follower who had been with Yoni since the late sixties will go on record with everything she's seen. We also have the exclusive first interview with Ethan Powell's ex-wife, a former attorney named Dana Morrison.

Lo has warm brown eyes and hair that goes down to her shoulders. I'm meeting her in an undisclosed location in New Mexico. She doesn't want to reveal her specific whereabouts because she fears Yoni might try to suck her back in. “This is the shortest my hair has been since 1968,” she says. “Yoni didn't like women with short hair. He said that it removed us from Mother Nature. But really, I think it just turned him off.” Lo joined Yoni as a teenager. Despite the gray hairs and the smattering of wrinkles, at 62, Lo still has the giddy air of an adolescent. Back when she first met him, Yoni was known as Aries, and he led a band of young followers from San Francisco to a commune in Mendocino County, California.

“All the young girls, we worshiped him,” Lo said. “He was so handsome, and he had all the answers. You have to understand, most of us were runaways who landed in San Francisco. We were desperate for some guidance, wherever we could find it. And here was this sexy guy telling us
we could throw off all the shackles of our uptight upbringings and live in this perfect world. It was very appealing.”

San Francisco was a hotbed for this kind of spiritual leader. According to NYU professor Darius Smithstein, there were at least 1,000 popular alternative spiritual leaders in Northern California between 1966 and 1975. “The most successful of these hucksters had thousands of followers. Your Jim Joneses, for example,” Smithstein explains. “John Brooks was somewhere in the middle. He had about 100 hard-core adherents, give or take.”

Lo said she was so blinded by her love for Aries that she didn't see the dark side of the Mendocino commune. “I now believe he was sexually abusing some of the other women. I never refused his advances, so I didn't experience it myself.” Lo couldn't understand how anyone could refuse the guru's advances. “He was basically a god to me,” she says, shaking her head.

So much so that Lo, along with two other women, fled that Mendocino commune with him on his say-so. He told them he wanted to spread the word about his teachings, but in truth he was running from the law. A former follower of Aries's had accused him of rape.

Lo says that immediately after they left Mendocino, she and Yoni got married—but only in the spiritual sense. “I think he married me to keep me under his thumb. Sexual faithfulness was never part of our union, but I stayed because I knew that being married to the guru gave me a kind of power that his other partners didn't have.”

They ultimately landed in New York, where John Brooks
adopted the name Yoni and found a place in the downtown counterculture of the late 1970s. He ran a macrobiotic restaurant out of his Jane Street residence, and used that base—called the Jane Street Ashram—to befriend the leading lights of the New York Buddhist community. “At first he seemed very devoted to teaching Tibetan Buddhism,” says Columbia University professor Daniel Bauer, who is one of the world's leading experts on Eastern religions and is an integral part of New York's Buddhist community. “He said he had studied under a guru in one of the most revered monasteries in India. At first we had no reason not to believe him. His followers really seemed to love him.”

But Yoni's fellow Buddhists soon grew suspicious. “There were an inordinate number of beautiful young women falling at Yoni's feet,” Bauer says. “We started worrying that Yoni was exploiting the power differential in ways that were not appropriate for a leader. We were concerned about the doctrine he was teaching, which seemed to have no relation to true Buddhism. Then we started to hear stories about what was going on behind the scenes at Jane Street.”

Those stories included mandatory orgies, sexual mind games, and sacred rituals involving the guru's semen. Lo confirms these stories, but will not give me any additional details. “It's too painful,” she says, shaking her head. Yoni's popularity really began to explode beyond the tight-knit local Buddhist community when he started combining his teachings with yoga classes for the public.
His public front was different from his private, sexual self. “I will say those rituals were kept among a handful of trustworthy followers,” Lo says. “Yoni knew that our practices would not be acceptable to outsiders.”

Yoni was smart enough to get the best yoga teachers around, which lent his studio an air of legitimacy. By that point, Yoni had moved out of the Jane Street Ashram into a bigger studio in Tribeca. He started preaching a kind of Eastern prosperity gospel, telling followers that if they developed good karma, all manner of earthly riches would come their way. Part of developing good karma involved giving their guru a tenth of their yearly income. In the early aughts, he took on a new spiritual wife. Her name? Ruth “Amaya” Walters.

“I knew we were entering a different phase in our relationship when Amaya started coming around,” Lo says. By then she was in her late forties, and Yoni was no longer interested in her sexually. “He said that I had become too holy for sexual contact,” she says, tearing up a little. “But obviously he just didn't want to touch me anymore.”

Walters was in her early twenties then, a recent college graduate and obsessive follower of Yoni's. She became his assistant and gatekeeper. In 2006, she started working at Green Wave, an advertising agency, as a nighttime copy editor, at Yoni's behest. He asked Amaya to work there because that's where Ethan Powell was employed, and Amaya had explicit instructions to seduce Ethan and bring him into the fold.

“I knew that Yoni was going after Ethan, but I didn't
know why,” Lo says. “He'd fixate on certain people, so it wasn't that out of character. I assumed, at the time, that he'd seen Ethan at one of the regular yoga classes at the ashram and had taken a liking to him.” It was only much later that she realized Yoni had tracked Ethan down because he had been conceived through the alleged rape back in Mendocino. His mother, Rosemary Powell—who was called Safflower in her Mendocino days—had died in a car accident in Montana in 1993. As of this writing, there's no evidence of foul play in her death.

Even though Amaya and Ethan initially got together because of Yoni's machinations, “Amaya genuinely fell in love with Kai, that much I know,” Lo says. “They were very sweet with each other.” When they fell in love, Amaya began to move away from Yoni emotionally. She had no way to know that her behavior would ultimately seal her fate.

Yoni was a savvy investor, and had used his followers' tithings wisely. He invested in a tech company that went public, and by 2005 he had enough money to buy the land in New Mexico that would become the Zuni Retreat and the secret Homestead. Two years later, Kai, Amaya, and Lo went with him to New Mexico. “I had nowhere else to go,” Lo says. “I'd been with him the whole of my adult life.”

Lo says that while Yoni superficially accepted Kai and Amaya's relationship, he never really forgave Kai for stealing his bride—or Amaya for influencing his son. “Not that he was ever faithful to Amaya,” Lo says bitterly, “but he
resented their love.” He couldn't really do anything about it, though: Kai and Amaya were the most popular teachers at the retreat, and he needed them to keep the high-paying visitors coming. It can cost over $10,000 a month to stay at the Zuni Retreat, and a reported $20,000 a month to stay at the Homestead, though the latter's fees are not publicly listed. “Yoni needed to keep getting those good reviews,” Lo says.

But Kai and Amaya were getting increasingly sick of paying homage to Yoni, which began to isolate them from the rest of Yoni's followers. Their isolation led to paranoia—a kind of folie à deux. “Kai became obsessed with some Aztec death goddess he read about. He and Amaya declared themselves her followers and started performing their own bloodletting rituals,” Lo says. “They'd come to dinner with bandages on their forearms. I pulled Amaya aside and asked her what was going on, because I was worried. But she said all of their activities were consensual—they were cutting themselves, not each other—and they were just exploring the limits of their connection.”

They were already deep into this isolated experimentation when Kai discovered the truth about his origins. “We were hanging around one evening after dinner,” Lo says. “Kai asked to look through a photo album I had kept from the early days with Yoni. I said sure, no problem. I was touched that he cared. He saw a photo in there that deeply disturbed him, and asked me about a woman in the image. I said, ‘Oh, that's Safflower. She ran away from the compound.' He asked me what happened to her, and I said
something like ‘Who cares?'” Lo shakes her head when she tells me this, embarrassed by the memory. “I had no idea Safflower was Kai's mother. I didn't find out until I met Dana.”

Dana Morrison Powell was a high-powered litigator at a white-shoe law firm when she found out that her ex-husband was dead. “It destroyed her,” says Beth Morrison, Dana's younger sister. “She never really got over it when Ethan left her in the first place, and finding out he was dead just scrambled her fucking brain.” Dana didn't believe that Ethan had killed Amaya and then himself, as law enforcement personnel seemed to think. This led her to the Zuni Retreat, and ultimately to the Homestead.

“It made no fucking sense,” Beth says, wiping away tears as I interview her over a latte at a Hungarian café in Manhattan. “I tried to talk her out of it. The only part of it I understood was that Dana is a tenacious person. When she gets an idea in her head, there's no convincing her to drop it.”

Lo first met Dana when she was staying at the Zuni Retreat, hoping to learn more about who her husband was in the years before he died. “We really bonded,” says Lo. Dana stood out to her, and she mentioned her to Yoni. Yoni, to Lo's surprise, suggested that Lo invite Dana to the Homestead, which was a respite for only the most devoted visitors to the Zuni Retreat. “He hadn't let me invite any students to the Homestead thus far,” Lo says, “and he'd never let anyone invite someone so new to our process.”
Lo looks down in shame. “I realize now that he told me to invite her because he knew she was Ethan's ex.”

When Dana got to the Homestead, Yoni enrolled her in Lo's Inner Child Workshop to keep a close eye on her. “She was the hardest-working student I have ever had, and we really made progress,” Lo says. They made so much progress that Dana felt she could tell Lo the truth about her identity. “She said that Safflower was Kai's mother, and Yoni was his real father, and that she believed that Kai had figured it out.” Lo laughs. “I was so clueless, I didn't even know Amaya and Kai were dead. I thought they had just gone on a spiritual journey somewhere. Yoni said we were never to speak of them or it might hurt their silent journey, and I believed him.”

Lo was so shaken by Dana's admission, she felt she needed to work through it. So she went to her two oldest friends, the only two women who were still around from the Mendocino days—they go by the names Veena and Dew—to tell them about it. They surprised her by informing her about everything that Yoni had shielded from her for all those years. “Veena said, ‘You old fool. How did you not know who Kai really was?' I guess I kept my head in the sand for a lot of years as a way of coping.” Lo starts crying at this point in our interview, and asks for a few minutes alone to collect herself.