My Life Cleanse: One Month Inside L.A.’s Cult of Betterness

Illustration by Simon Abranowicz

On a Saturday in June 2018, in a darkened underground room near Los Angeles International Airport, I yelled things at my father I wouldn’t say to him at gunpoint. My mother heard stuff even worse. My parents were sitting across from me, holding hands, while approximately 150 people on every side of me shouted at their families in a mayhem. Actors. Executives. Fashion models. Engineers. Every 20 seconds or so, the noise got louder, when on top of it all came the voice of our trainer, a 50-something woman with an emotional chokehold on her voice, who shouted into her microphone, as if our lives hung in the balance, What did they do to you?! Tell them what they did!

The room was a circus of tortured beasts.

I hate you, you fucking asshole!

You bitch! BITCH!!!

Why couldn’t you love meeeeeeeeee?!??!

AiaiaiiaiaAIIAIAIAIAIIAIAIAIAIHGHGHHGHGHGHGHG

Call it hysterical transference. Call it psychological strip-mining. Not a single parent spoke, because they were only there in spirit. We’d projected their likenesses onto our “dyad” partner, a person sitting across from us, knees clasping knees, another traumatized man or woman likewise yelling stuff. And the fantasy worked: I really did see my parents in the dark, staring back to me with shattered looks. Though by that point I was mentally crooked from several days of emotional manipulation and little sleep, all part of a five-day training, stage one in a three-tier curriculum I had joined, in which I’d been doing this kind of stuff for long stretches, late into the night, in a high-pressure setting where the rules about what I could and could not do were strictly enforced. Rules like when I should urinate or defecate, when I could speak to other people, when I was permitted to eat food or drink water.

Then our trainer told us to picture our parents dead. Which may not sound like a big deal, but we’d been messed with for several days straight. All hell broke loose. Howling. Roaring. Call it mass abreaction. I started sobbing, to a point that I was bent double, head between my legs, feeling like I was about to throw up on my partner’s shoes.

In a moment of lucidity, I thought to myself, while a woman near me crumpled to her knees, This really isn’t how this article was supposed to go.

Los Angeles is less of a region than a weather system, less of a city than a county, less of a metropolis than an 88-city nation-state. Canyons burn. Slopes slide. We’re a megalopolis of cement, of roads that threaten to rupture beneath our feet. There’s no safety net if you’re not rich; people slip through the cracks constantly. It took me three and a half years to figure out one thing, perhaps the only thing I know for certain about L.A.: Anything can happen at any second. Which provokes a sense of doom or wild hope, depending on the day.

And you feel it in your bones, that sense of uncertainty. Los Angeles has been more of a myth than a reality at different times in history; now it’s all reality. Nearly 58,000 county residents are homeless. L.A. has the country’s largest jail system; it cages more people than any other city in the United States. And if you’re lucky enough to avoid those two fates, our mild climate can still feel cold. You’re never successful enough, never pretty enough. Our devotion to fitness lets our worship of the flesh seem less like narcissism (though it is) and more like noncompliance (with death). L.A. is a competitive place, full of transplants on the seek. And with each season comes a new diet (“any three-day cleanse for $90”), a new treatment to fix what’s wrong (the “Viora Reaction,” the “Vampire Facelift”). Self-help has become a habit in America, but it’s pathological in Southern California. Life coaches advertise on telephone poles. Storefront psychics are open 24/7. Writing in 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, said, “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.”

I took a walk with a “complexity coach” who treated patients while hiking. I did an afternoon spell session with a witch. I attended a Gnostic Mass in a strip mall.

I’ve never loved a place like I love L.A., and I love it all. Lakewood. Glendale. Give me Burbank over Brooklyn. I’ve done my best to make it home, but it’s tricky. At no time does Los Angeles love you back. Los Angeles doesn’t even know you’re here. Over the years, my wife and I started to notice how people who were born here, or who’ve lived here for a while, have a few L.A.-ish habits that they keep private, as if to protect their roots. A healer in the family. Mushroom chocolates for bluesy Tuesdays. A $60 “wellness” powder in their purse. Once, inside a week, I had two separate conversations about the psychological benefits of somebody’s ayahuasca ceremony, as if it were just another treatment clinic on San Vicente, not a hallucinatory experience so gut-churning that some participants wear diapers.

Which made me start to wonder: Maybe my tarot knows something I don’t. So that became the idea. Four weeks of the latest and greatest in Los Angeles woo-woo, sampling everything on offer in our present New Age. Crystals in East L.A. Holy Rollers on Hollywood Boulevard. An Oracle in Jefferson Park. But nothing too dangerous, we agreed, nothing nefarious or with the power to bend minds. That wasn’t the plan at all.

One of the first places I visited was the Los Angeles chapter of the Aetherius Society. The group gathers at a collection of pink buildings just south of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Society’s founder, Dr. George King, was first contacted by extraterrestrials in 1954. “It took me by surprise, actually,” he said in a television interview with the BBC. An alien, named Aetherius, told him, “Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of interplanetary parliament.”

King died in 1997, but the Society marches on, fulfilling his mission—which, as far as I understood it, involves transmitting “spiritual energy” into “prayer power batteries” (they look like elaborate shoeboxes), which store that energy so it can later be sent to troubled points in the universe via a “radionic antenna.” About 40 of us gathered one Saturday in the Society’s temple for an event called “Experience the Power of a Great Spiritual Master.” (Everyone I met referred to Dr. King as the Master.) The day’s speaker was Brian Keneipp, executive director of the Society’s American headquarters. He wore a dark blazer and gray slacks; he looked like he might have been an Episcopal lay minister in another life. For about an hour, Keneipp led us through two practices, the first of which drew a “violet flame” from Mother Earth into our bodies, which he warned us might feel velvety. I didn’t feel it myself, though one man said, “I don’t know how to put it into words, but the feeling was like that old song…” Then he began to sing, They call me mellow yellow.

The room laughed good-heartedly and, I should say, all morning long, everyone I met was earnest, friendly, never pushy at all; they just believed in UFOs and wanted to know if I might, too.

After the next practice, a “mystic white magic ritual for protection,” which included yanking white energy out from our solar plexuses, we listened to recordings of Dr. King channeling messages from other Masters in outer space. “With a 99 percent accuracy rate, which is pretty good,” Keneipp said, chuckling. The first message, from a being named Mars Sector Six, was some kind of warning about terrestrial man. The second was from “the Master Jesus,” talking about the importance of “tuning in.” The session ended soon after that, and I became a center of attention; it seemed like I was one of the only first-timers in the room. One gentleman wanted me to know he’d been doing Dr. King’s dishes one night—this was back when the Master was still alive, “and quite virile”—and the Master suddenly entered the kitchen and transformed before his eyes into “a large, white ovoid shape,” his “etheric body!”

“That’s quite a gift he gave you,” another man said reverently.

Keneipp said he wanted me to know that in addition to the Master being handsome and virile, he also had a good sense of humor. For example, one time, Dr. King was communicating with extraterrestrial beings who were in a spacecraft hovering over Bangladesh to help victims of a typhoon. But then they realized they were needed in Washington to inspire politicians to help with the relief effort. They made the trip in three seconds flat. The Master later told Keneipp, “I think they may have exceeded the speed limit there.”

We all laughed, then Keneipp stood up, announced it was time to go, and led us to a different building on the grounds, where we enjoyed a champagne brunch.

Over the course of May 2018, I tried something New Age-y every day. I did Kundalini yoga with slender women in white turbans. I did a juice cleanse and hallucinated a bean burrito on day three. I attended a “plant communication” workshop in Topanga Canyon, where I was taught how to engage in a long conversation with a bush. Many mornings, I put a pinch of adaptogenic “Brain Dust” in my coffee ($38 for approximately 14 teaspoons) to align me “with the cosmic flow for great achievement,” though it mostly aligned me with dry mouth. But really, the options around Los Angeles County for self-healing, “self-hacking,” in a spiritual and/or groovy fashion, appeared endless. I took a walk with a “complexity coach” who treated patients while hiking. I did an afternoon spell session with a witch. I attended a Gnostic Mass in a strip mall where a woman sat nude on an altar while the rest of us accepted the Eucharist in front of her vagina—and afterward, the clergy served, per L.A. custom, I guess, a complimentary champagne brunch.

The month was full of surprises. Nothing was a waste of time. In A Course in Miracles, one of the core texts of the New Age movement, Helen Schucman wrote, “If you wish to be the author of reality, which is totally impossible anyway, you will insist on holding onto judgment.” Perhaps one reason I went around so judgment-free was because nearly every person, every group I met was welcoming, warm, seemingly acting on best intentions. I just wish I didn’t have to stick the word “nearly” in there.

I learned about Mastery in Transformational Training (M.I.T.T.) from Sonja¹, a woman I know from surfing. In 2016, she was bursting to tell me about a “transformation workshop” she attended that changed her life. When I inquired how exactly, she refused to say; I needed to experience it for myself. “Well, that sounds kind of culty,” I remember thinking. In fact, in a search on Yelp in May for “cults” in Los Angeles, M.I.T.T. ranked fourth, behind three megachurches. From one user’s comment: When more than one review for a “business” starts with “This is seriously NOT a cult!!”, you should probably avoid that place.

M.I.T.T. is a Culver City–based self-help program that offers, according to its website, “an action-oriented, experiential learning program that addresses all dimensions of human nature.” Beginners are encouraged to start with “Basic Training,” a five-day class that costs about $700, promising “an action-oriented, experiential learning program” that will enable “discovery in the most crucial aspects of your life.”

But the website is vague beyond that about what happens in the training. After I signed up, a telephone interview was required. It involved a lot of questions about my mental health. “Have you ever tried to commit suicide?” “Have you ever been in a coma?” “Do you acknowledge that no one at M.I.T.T. is a trained mental-health professional?” (I said, Really?)

Soon it started to feel like upselling. The woman interviewing me explained how the Basic Training was only step one in a three-part program, and I’d really need to sign up for their Advanced Training ($1,195) and Legacy Program ($1,595) to see the full results. I said it would be helpful to know a little more about what I’d be doing in these trainings.

“The training will have you question your beliefs. It’s going to be uncomfortable. Can I count on you to participate?”

I laughed. “Can you be more specific?”

“Can I count on you to participate?”

“But in what?”

She sighed with frustration. “You get to have catharsis.”

“Catharsis?”

“I don’t want to give you everything before you experience it.”

Which is how I came to arrive, with about 150 other “trainees,” at a Marriott hotel near LAX on a Wednesday evening for the start of five days of self-help boot camp. I had told Sonja I was attending. She texted me on the morning of my first day, telling me to enjoy myself.

For newcomers, M.I.T.T. can seem like a sideshow barker, promising mind-blowing experiences once you get inside the tent, but you have to take their word for it and pay first. We walked into a large ballroom to the sounds of “Change” by Tracy Chapman. We were every color, all ages. And as soon as we walked in, a bunch of M.I.T.T. veterans, volunteer staff members for our training, equally diverse though dressed in formal wear, applauded us wildly with big smiles on their faces. In front of us, rows of chairs faced an empty stage. A pair of women shouted at us to “FILL UP THE FRONT ROWS FIRST.” Finally, once we’d taken our seats, the doors closed and our trainer, a woman whom I’ll call Aunt Lydia for a few similarities I’ll explain later, took the stage. She told us she’d been doing these workshops around the world for 30 years. “Trust me,” Aunt Lydia said, laughing, “you have no idea what you’re getting into.”

She continued to speak for about two hours, which I’ll summarize in a Q&A format.

What did she say? That by enrolling in M.I.T.T., we’d entered a three-stage curriculum that would last about four months, from Basic to Advanced to Legacy, or “LP,” whose combined purpose was to show us how to live a life of no regrets, discover our most authentic self, break out of our survival context, and get clear about our purpose in life.

But how exactly? By experiencing a number of “breakthroughs,” achievable with M.I.T.T.’s proprietary “technology.”

Like one of those E-meters the Scientologists use? No.

Doesn’t technology need to have some scientific backing? Not in this case. That said, according to Aunt Lydia, we should trust the process, because the technology was profound, no matter that she wouldn’t tell us what it was. But we should trust her because it had worked for hundreds of thousands of people before us.

So where is M.I.T.T.’s “technology” obtainable? Mostly in the Advanced and Legacy courses, though we’d get a taste of it during our five days of Basic. The Advanced Training, assuming we wanted to continue—and we definitely, definitely would, Aunt Lydia insisted—would start a week after our Basic was done. “The training was designed, and it was designed, many, many years ago,” Aunt Lydia said, though she didn’t seem to know who created it. (“Who in hell designed this?” she exclaimed at one point.) Nevertheless, “this has been working for over 40 years,” she said, producing results “so priceless, so profound, they’d never have happened otherwise.”

Saying this made Aunt Lydia frown, choke up, and start to cry from her seat onstage. A man sitting next to me sniffled in response, as if by reflex.

If you had to estimate how many times Aunt Lydia choked up and nearly cried per day, causing other people around the room to choke up and nearly cry or begin crying... One dozen times.

So what was the subtext of the whole thing? That the Basic Training, as “technology,” required us to enroll in M.I.T.T.’s complete slate of classes for best results. “The training is a profound opportunity,” Aunt Lydia said. After all, who wants to live a life of regrets? Over and over she insisted how valuable it was, how life-changing it could be, that if our minds weren’t completely blown away—

Doth the lady protest too much? Well, yeah.

By the way, the whole “no regrets” thing? At one point Aunt Lydia invoked Henry David Thoreau as her inspiration, whose last words, she said, choking up, were “No regrets.” Unfortunately, Thoreau’s real last words were “moose” and “Indian.”

Around the two-hour mark, I needed to take a piss. I stood up and walked discreetly to the exit. Aunt Lydia was explaining how we needed to approach the Basic as if our lives depended on it, then said loudly, with heavy sarcasm, “Or you can get up and leave and go to the bathroom.” The crowd laughed, all eyes on me. Staff members stared with alarm. I kept going toward the doors. Two of the staff moved toward me and I awkwardly squeezed between them.

In the restroom, it occurred to me that for all of Aunt Lydia’s admonishments and hubris, the sanctimony invoked around the power of the curriculum—I’d somehow found my way into self-help’s version of The Handmaid’s Tale (but with a lot more weeping).

When I returned, Aunt Lydia was asking people to suggest ways that we could avoid participating in the training. “Being late.” “Being distracted.” She noticed me and dictated to a volunteer, “Add to the list: going to the bathroom.” She turned to the crowd and said angrily, “The doors are open, okay? But notice if you leave the room, you’re making space for other people to leave the room.” This made her choke up and wipe her eye. “And that’s someone whose life is at stake. And you’re…you’re...you’re walking away,” she said, her voice faltering.

Suggesting that by going to the restroom, I’d nearly ruined someone’s life.

The second half of the evening continued after a short break.² Aunt Lydia made us promise to be back in our seats “by the time the music stops.” Tracy Chapman was playing again as we filed out. About 20 minutes later, the music shifted loudly to Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra,” better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. People ran to their seats. During the final notes, Aunt Lydia strode to the stage. A dozen people were still walking in. She commanded them to stop. “Do you acknowledge you broke your promise?”

They didn’t get it.

“Do you acknowledge you broke your promise?” she said, more sinister.

For the next hour, Aunt Lydia explained a set of “ground rules” we needed to obey through Sunday. No tardiness. No phones. No “side-talking” with others, which meant no conversing unless instructed, and no saying “bless you” if someone sneezed. Also, no alcohol or drugs, and no eating or drinking at any time in the ballroom. People raised their hands; several wanted to be able to sip water for medical reasons. Aunt Lydia confronted them one at a time. By the point we’d heard a third and fourth person explain what sounded like a valid medical reason for needing to drink water—an older couple with respiratory issues—she seemed appalled. She turned to us, sneering, “I’ve honestly never had this happen before in a training.”

When a fourth person said she was on a special diet that required her to eat at precise times, Aunt Lydia started laughing and looked at us like, Who does she think she is? The woman said she merely wanted to know when breaks would be scheduled so she could plan out her meals.

“I won’t tell you that,” Aunt Lydia said. “No one here will tell you that.”

Eventually the woman sat down again.

Incidentally, M.I.T.T. doesn’t offer refunds.

Around midnight, we split into smaller groups with a staff member—all of them were there as volunteers, I later learned—who established times we’d be required to telephone the next morning to check in. I got home an hour later and fell asleep around 2; then my alarm went off at 5 for work.

At my appointed check-in time of 7:30 a.m., I called Jon, my small-group leader. Jon asked how my first day had gone. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t believe people paid good money for this crap. I said something about how it seemed like Therapy 101 with a side order of humiliation. I asked, If the training was good enough to be “technology,” why was it kept a secret, in the city of self-promotion no less? Who invented it anyway? Jon asked, “So where do you think these feelings came from?” I said defensively, probably my hatred of bullies? Jon said, “Well…,” then thanked me for my honesty, which he said was integral to any M.I.T.T. journey, and he looked forward to seeing me that night.

One word that never appeared in Aunt Lydia’s lectures was “lifespring.” Lifespring was a popular New Age transformation program in the 1970s and ’80s, similar to groups like Landmark or EST. (Television fans may recognize EST from its role in recent seasons of The Americans.) As a Large Group Awareness Training, as they’re known amongst psychologists, Lifespring offered a five-day “Basic” training followed by an “Advanced” class, followed by a “Leadership” program, all part of a self-help curriculum.

Marc Fisher, a journalist for The Washington Post, attended one of Lifespring’s Basic trainings in 1987. While reporting a story on the group, Fisher learned that Lifespring’s executives had known for years that some trainees experienced adverse reactions. The group’s founder, John Hanley, told Fisher, “If a thousand people get benefit from the training, and one person is harmed, I’d can it.” And yet, according to Fisher’s investigation, over the years there’d been dozens of “casualties,” Lifespring’s name for people who left the training with severe psychological issues.

By the time the Washington Post story went to print, according to its reporting, about 35 trainees had sued Lifespring; six people had died. In one case that Lifespring settled, a man who couldn’t swim was persuaded by his trainer to dive into a river to overcome his fear. He drowned. “Lifespring denied any responsibility, saying that no one forced [him] to jump in the river,” Fisher wrote. “ ‘The training doesn’t cause anything,’ Hanley said then. ‘Life causes stuff.’ ” In another example cited by the Post, a woman had an asthma attack during a training. Trainers told her the asthma was self-induced. “When she finally left the room, she wandered into a parking lot, collapsed and died after five days in a coma.” Lifespring denied responsibility and paid the woman’s family $450,000 to settle their claim.

Thanks to Lifespring’s success, Hanley became a multimillionaire. Previous to Lifespring, Hanley committed a felony, Fisher discovered. In 1969, Hanley and a partner were found guilty of mail fraud. In a separate case, the Wisconsin Justice Department sued him and others for running a pyramid scheme, unrelated to Lifespring, which Hanley paid to settle in 1975. Hanley denied responsibility and only paid up, he told the Post, because he didn’t want to pay a lawyer.

Fast-forward to 1998. A Dutch woman named Margo Majdi, a Lifespring trainee and the owner of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills, purchased the rights to the trainings from Hanley. A publicist told her that Lifespring had gained a bad reputation by that point, and she should really consider changing the name. Majdi came up with M.I.T.T.

On my second night in the basement, the subject was victimization, realizing how, why, and when we’d been victims in our lives and who victimized us. But the lesson came with M.I.T.T.’s special spin—which came straight from Lifespring—that victimhood is almost entirely self-made, and you need to find a way to take responsibility for whatever happened to you in order to overcome it.

But mostly day two was about the ground rules again. After one break, to the bellowing strains of 2001, several people returned late. Aunt Lydia read them the riot act. She singled out a woman I’ll call Nadia. You, the one twirling your hair. That’s some kind of survival tic you’ve picked up?³

Sure, that’s it, Nadia said dryly.

Do you have a problem with me? Aunt Lydia asked.

I think you’re obnoxious.

Oh, you do.

Yes, I do.

Nadia had an accent, maybe British. Aunt Lydia started to imitate it—she often did this when people had accents; she seemed to find it hilarious—while accusing Nadia of needing to be right. Nadia accused her of the same. The argument went on for two minutes while people in the audience squirmed, until a baffled Aunt Lydia gave Nadia the finger. Nadia gave her the finger right back. Toward the conclusion of their fight, Aunt Lydia yelled at us, How many of you think I’m a badass amazing super coach? Most hands went up. And how many of you think I’m some kind of obnoxious bitch? About 20 people, including me.⁴

I got back to bed again around 2 a.m. and set my alarm for five. Other participants in the training also had day jobs, though many told me they’d taken the week off from work. Several were from out of town: a father-daughter pair from Oregon; a mother from Florida who told me her daughter had done M.I.T.T. through LP. She wouldn’t stop talking about it. I just wanted to see for myself what it was all about.

Beyond the Advanced and LP courses, M.I.T.T. also offers a “Ph.D. program”—there’s no actual academic accreditation—plus several workshops, retreats, corporate trainings. During my drive home that night, the main purpose of M.I.T.T. had seemed pretty clear: to make Ms. Majdi, Aunt Lydia, and whoever else a bunch of money, in a system where the biggest epiphanies were one class away. And surely, even more faucets of cash would be opened if they persuaded us to draft our friends and family to join. (Multiple people informed me that close to 100 percent of trainees are referrals—M.I.T.T. doesn’t advertise—in part because students are eventually expected to recruit, or “enroll,” outsiders.)

The morning of day three, I had another check-in call scheduled for 7:30. By the time it went through, the clock on my phone ticked over—7:31. Jon answered tersely, “You realize you just broke your promise.”

“Uh, ok.”

“So I need you to acknowledge that.”

Throughout the training, people would stand up before the group and share their reason for being there. One story after another of trauma: abusive parents, sexual violence. At one point, we stood in two lines facing each other. Aunt Lydia instructed us to hold up one finger for each promise we’d broken that week. (Three for me: being late to the call with Jon; side-talking a couple times; a shot of tequila to wind down at night.) Well, we were pitiful. No wonder our lives were crap: We were crap. I can’t even tell you how pathetic this is. Aunt Lydia reminded us that we’d promised to complete the course, which included a mandatory interview for Advanced Training, which would start the following week for an additional $1,200 bucks, and was that going to be a problem for anyone? Several hands went up. People had jobs, people lived out of state, they needed exceptions. Aunt Lydia questioned them one by one. She fumed at one point, People didn’t use to have exceptions. You’d stay all night, and they’d have breakthrough after breakthrough.

This was as close as Aunt Lydia ever came to acknowledging that M.I.T.T. was Lifespring repackaged.

One exercise that night, lights out, we kneeled on the ground while visualizing ourselves digging through a junkyard. The “garbage” was broken promises: promises that had been made to us by our family and friends; promises we’d made to them and ourselves. Meanwhile, the staff played sappy songs by Cat Stevens and Whitney Houston at very loud volume to rock us weepy—they did this frequently to stoke our emotions—and on top of it all, Aunt Lydia would shout, Who promised to love you? Who promised to keep you safe? Maybe you were abused as a child! Maybe you were sexually abused! Who broke their promise to you? Keep digging! Slowly but surely, young women bawled. Old men rocked in place. A personal trainer pounded the floor with clenched fists. I made the mistake of kneeling about six feet in front of Aunt Lydia, so anytime she yelled into the microphone, it almost split my ears. Though I also heard her, mid-choke-up, put the mic down at one point and chastise a staff member in a normal tone, something about the soundtrack. Then she picked up the microphone and resumed her trembling “vulnerable” voice.

It wasn’t until a few days after my Basic Training that I discovered The Washington Post’s reporting. So much was familiar: the trainer’s humiliation of trainees; the hokey fantasies and weeping participants; an impression that the “technology” drained wallets by fiddling with exhausted minds. According to the article, Hanley, Lifespring’s founder, got a D in the only psychology class he ever took. Even the story’s title rang a bell: “I Cried Enough to Fill a Glass”

Marc Fisher is now a senior editor at the Post. He’d heard about M.I.T.T. several times over the years, and he wasn’t surprised by its popularity. “This is the perfect time for a resurgence of interest in these kinds of programs,” Fisher told me. “We’re living in a time that’s tailor-made for an M.I.T.T., a Lifespring, or an EST. It’s a time of tremendous dislocation in people’s careers and the economies of families. It’s a time of political polarization. It’s a time of loss of community as a result of social media. It’s only natural that people are craving the connections and the meaning that these programs promise.”

I asked Fisher what stood out in his memories from 30 years ago. “The relative ease with which the guy running the program could assert control over a large room of people. And not just the willingness but the eagerness of people to be led and for someone to take authority over them.” He added, “Any time we’re in a crisis of government, or parenting, or family structure, all those things that made this society so unsettled, for somebody to come along and tell you, ‘This is how things are going to be. This is what you need to do to fix it. And then everything’s going to be okay, or better’—that’s pretty powerful.”

At the end of day three, in semi-darkness, while volunteers blasted us with Tracy Chapman’s “The Rape of the World”—M.I.T.T. really spoiled Tracy Chapman for me—we sat with bowed heads while Aunt Lydia read aloud statistics about global suffering. Like the amount of pollution caused by single-use plastics; and how many shelter dogs are euthanized per year; and something about how many dogs get eaten by Chinese people? By that point Aunt Lydia had told us several times that she ran a dog rescue on the side—it seemed to explain the preponderance of canine-related statistics. Anyway, the world was cursed, humans were repulsive, and so behind closed doors near the airport, a dark room of repulsive, cursed humans cried softly, including me.

Several months after my training, I visited M.I.T.T.’s founder, Margo Majdi, at her home near Beverly Hills. A white SUV gleamed in the driveway. A woman escorted me into her dining room, where we sat for an hour at a long table, surrounded by reflective surfaces. Majdi is in her mid-70s. She’d had back surgery recently and was in a wheelchair. Still, her eyes were clear and tireless; her face glowed warmly as she spoke. Behind her, in the kitchen, a pair of chandeliers shimmered from light coming in through a window.

Majdi was born and raised in Holland. She moved to the United States in 1970. She did Lifespring for the first time ten years later, “and it was absolutely phenomenal.” Years passed while she ran her beauty salon, until 1997, when she decided to get out of the business. “I started actually working out of my house here,” she said. “And I had one of my clients, she walked in—she is a doctor and she goes, ‘Oh, my God, I just did Lifespring.’ I go, ‘Lifespring, that’s still around?’ ”

Majdi promptly retook the Basic Training, then jumped into the Advanced and Leadership courses, experiencing “one breakthrough after another.” But the number of participants was less than half of what she remembered from 1980; recruitment had plummeted. “The business is based on enrollment,” she told me. “The leadership people enroll, enroll, enroll.” But Lifespring, as her publicist pointed out, had gotten a bad name by that point. “When I made it Mastery in Transformational Training, everybody thought I was crazy,” she said. “Notice now everything is called mastery, mastermind, master this, master tribe.”

Majdi said she didn’t change much about Lifespring besides the name. She altered the Leadership Program, what M.I.T.T. calls LP; otherwise the trainings were the same. And yes, it was part of LP that participants are expected to recruit outsiders to M.I.T.T., “to create their own legacy,” she explained. When I asked approximately how many people go through her trainings, she declined to answer, saying only that numbers were up, and they do around eleven Basic Trainings a year, plus the subsequent Advanced and LP courses, not to mention all of the other classes available. And what did she hope newcomers like me would take away from the Basic? “It’s for them to look deeper within themselves and to really see what’s stopping them,” she said. “You don’t know actually what you’re capable of. But if you start recognizing what’s stopping you, you will break through to that and actually overcome your fear, and then you might just step into the next level.”

I asked Majdi to help me understand one of Lifespring’s and M.I.T.T.’s more provocative ideas, that victimhood is a choice, that a victim needs to take responsibility for whatever happened to them. “It’s like this,” she said. “You know, I’ve been victimized in my life. You’ve been victimized in your life. But if I still constantly walk around being a victim, who has my power?” She added, “I’m not saying if you’re raped, you’re not a victim. But you know what I would say? That then again, it’s how you choose to look at it. How you choose to look at everything in life. I can say, like, ‘Well, you know…’ I can say, like, ‘I shouldn’t have been there.’ ”

“That’s how you take responsibility for it?”

“ ‘I shouldn’t have been there.’ ”

“You shouldn’t have put yourself into a situation where something like rape could happen?”

“ ‘I shouldn’t have left drunk.’ ‘I should maybe not have been drinking that much.’ ‘I should have watched who I’m sitting next to.’ ”

“I think that’s a difficult thing for people to hear,” I said.

“Yes. It is.”

I asked if she was bothered by people calling M.I.T.T. a cult, a frequent description in negative reviews online. Majdi laughed. Did I see anyone sitting on the floor worshipping her feet? “The moment you came out of the womb, you’re in a cult. Think about it. You’re told what to say, what not to say, how to dress, how to eat.”

Majdi described trainings she’d done in China⁵, a book she published, a foundation she started to do “transformational leadership workshops”or teenagers. By all measures, she was a successful, diversified businesswoman. I brought up people having unfortunate reactions to Lifespring—did M.I.T.T. ever experience anything like that? She reminded me about their screening process, to keep out applicants with troubled histories, but yes, they’d had problems. “Like, I hear years later that even some people, they go, like, ‘I was suicidal, Margo.’ I go, ‘How did you get that in my training?’ But you know what? Sometimes people make up things like that. And then, so, thank God that I cannot say that anything really bad has happened. I had, actually, just a couple months ago, somebody came after us and said something bad happened. So I don’t know. I don’t know.”

A few weeks after my training, I found a complaint from May 2017, brought against Majdi and M.I.T.T. in California’s Superior Court. In the lawsuit, Dana Wampole, who took the Basic and Advanced trainings in 2015, accused M.I.T.T. of “thought reform” and “brainwashing” so intense that she experienced a psychotic break, causing her to cycle through “extreme confabulations, violent acting out and a catatonic state requiring four-point restraint and psychiatric hospitalization.”

Dana Wampole lives in Los Angeles. She was 32 when she did the trainings. She’d recently started a new job she enjoyed; life was good. What got Dana into M.I.T.T. was her sister, who was taking the LP program. (Recruiting others into M.I.T.T. is a part of the LP.) At the time, Dana had been planning to hire a consultant to help her grow her photography business. Her sister convinced her that doing M.I.T.T.—the Basic Training costs about the same as the consultant—would be far more beneficial.

Dana and I spoke recently. She said that before she did the trainings, she’d never experienced anxiety. No history of addictions, eating disorders, any psychological problems. “There was absolutely no reason that I thought I would be any more at risk doing this program than anybody else.”

“It’s a pretty nasty organization,” Dana’s lawyer, Ford Greene, told me. In the past, Greene has successfully represented clients against the Church of Scientology. “The consequences on Dana were drastic and severe.”

Dana described the Advanced Training as far more intense than the Basic. Echoing much of what was alleged in her lawsuit, she said in one exercise a man was persuaded to wear a diaper. Dana had to walk around in a ball gown and tiara. She was later required to perform an exotic dance. “I think the fact that it sounds so absurd makes people not believe it. And that can be problematic, because if something sounds really outrageous, [people] very quickly will say, ‘Well, that wouldn’t happen to me.’ ”

Dana’s sister quit the LP training shortly after she was hospitalized. Dana recognizes that she was under pressure to enroll her. “It’s unfortunate that a group like this can take advantage of the trust that you have in your family members and your friends, and use that to their advantage.”

After M.I.T.T., Dana saw a therapist to treat symptoms of PTSD. Three years later, she continues to attend a support group for cult survivors. M.I.T.T. disputes Dana’s allegations. In fact, her case was recently dismissed due to two arbitration agreements that she signed while at M.I.T.T. Toward the end of our interview, I asked Dana if she ever hired that photography consultant. She smiled ruefully and said yes. “It did wonders.”

Shortly after I started working on this article, a connection introduced me to a young man I’ll call Jeremy. Jeremy did the Basic Training recently. He’s in his mid-20s, originally from Oregon.⁶ Jeremy learned about M.I.T.T. from a college roommate who did the trainings all the way up to the Ph.D. level and sang rapture around the experience. “I put a lot of trust in [M.I.T.T.] because he put a lot of trust in them,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t really know where their techniques were coming from. I didn’t know if they were trained. Of course they’re not. At all.”

Jeremy said he’d found the Basic Training problematic but intriguing. He studied psychology in college; M.I.T.T. felt like a scam. “The moment I stepped into the first day, the first day of the Basic, the word ‘cult’ was screaming in my head. All these people in tuxes clapping at you.” He went on to take the Advanced course but soon was disillusioned. The exercises were a lot more negative, he said. “It was really bizarre and confusing. It was a lot more challenging to see the merits of it. It felt more like a traumatizing experience.”

If there’s one thing that connects many of the people I spoke to for this story, it’s that they’re searching. Searching for meaning. Searching for purpose.

In his late teens, Jeremy experienced a psychotic break, requiring a year of treatment to heal. During the initial screening process, after he informed M.I.T.T., they asked him to get a therapist to certify that he’d be fine doing the training. After he did, he says, a trainer also asked him to give them his word that he’d be okay. After completing the Basic and Advanced courses, Jeremy started the Legacy Program, then decided to quit. But as soon as he opted out, he began to receive phone calls from M.I.T.T. members, wondering why he was letting himself down. Jeremy called a friend outside M.I.T.T. She said he didn’t sound safe. He decided he needed to get away, to leave California. He headed for Boston, where a friend said he could crash. Even there, he couldn’t sleep. He felt guilty for disappointing people. He started to wonder if M.I.T.T. was stalking him. “I got really isolated and scared,” he said. “I started feeling like I wouldn’t be able to connect with anybody ever again.”

A week after he arrived in Boston, Jeremy experienced a second psychotic break and threw himself into the Charles River. A police officer saw what happened and pulled him out. Jeremy spent a month in a hospital. These days, Jeremy lives in a new city. He has a new job, a new apartment. During a lull in our conversation, talking about why he’d stuck it out with M.I.T.T., Jeremy said quietly, “A lot of the exercises put you in a victim mindset and then blame you for being there. Including any trauma that you’ve ever been through.” He paused. “I honestly thought it would get better.”

If there’s one thing that connects many of the people I spoke to for this story, it’s that they’re searching. Searching for meaning. Searching for purpose. Just another human in their apartment at the end of the day. Because to be a somebody in L.A. without a something is to be a nobody—that’s what these people made me think.

On Saturday, day four of M.I.T.T., we vented and spleened and cried catharsis with glassy eyes. Aunt Lydia was the gaslight, peer pressure was the oxygen. I even began to doubt the premises of my skepticism, until finally I was telling them, Yes, yes, I know, I know, I’m broken, I’m damaged, it’s all my fault. And even then, maybe I wasn’t giving it everything. Even when it felt like I was giving it my all, maybe I was still holding back. Maybe I feared truly submitting to something that could radically improve my life.

Nope: It was stupid. And by 2 a.m., during a foggy drive home on the freeway, having cried my guts out, having listened for days to person after person share their darkest problems—addiction, suicide, depression—I decided I was done. Finished. I was driving home empty, albeit mildly stoned from an oxytocin super-high after the final exercise that evening. All 150 of us had been encouraged to “heart hug” each other, one by one, over the course of an hour. Twenty seconds of full-body contact with nearly every person in the ballroom while Aunt Lydia told slushy anecdotes over the loudspeakers about people’s lives being ruined, to the tune of Coldplay, Logic, and also a bunch of golden oldies I knew from the radio—song choices, I presume, that had been engraved in some Lifespring master handbook from the late ’70s.

I brought up the odd choice of songs with Marc Fisher, the Washington Post reporter. “They use those songs because they have the requisite emotional impact,” he said. “They use the same techniques through the program because people come back for more and buy the next level. They don’t even have to have a ridiculous origin story like the Scientologists. It’s really pared down, simple, and effective.”

Sunday morning, day five, the big finale, I slept late. When M.I.T.T. telephoned, I went grocery shopping. I had acquired an idea that Jon, my small-group leader, was going to come looking for me, so I needed to avoid being home. Two hours later, when he didn’t show up, my mood changed. I was disappointed. Adrift. I felt like I’d let him down. I felt like I’d abandoned my small group. They’d become confidants, friends, people to hug during break. Aunt Lydia had told us repeatedly how, anytime we disengaged during the training, we’d failed not only ourselves but everyone else. I shot Jon a text, explaining my absence. Jon replied: “I’m sad that you won’t be here today but I understand that everyone has their own journey and I appreciate how you played this week. You stayed open and I believe you got some great value and I hope it can lead you to continue diving deep.”

Jon and I met recently at his home in the Valley. Jon’s a successful entrepreneur, earnest and grounded. In terms of M.I.T.T., he did the full curriculum and he volunteered on staff a couple times. But he knows M.I.T.T. can seem culty. He blames it on people who take it too seriously. “You can tell it’s like, wow, if M.I.T.T. closed their doors tomorrow, [they’d] go back to being lost.” For Jon, M.I.T.T. is a “platform” to help him understand himself better, similar to seeing a therapist, or watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s motivational videos. Regarding the “enrollment” structure, he’s not bothered by it at all. M.I.T.T. is a business; to see it otherwise was foolish. “I told my buddy, who’s a photographer, I was like, ‘Dude, if you came up with a system that you could have your employees bring you more business, and it doesn’t cost you a dollar, would you do it?’ He’s like, ‘What? Well, yeah, but not in this way.’ I’m like, ‘No, it’s not in a wrong way, because they’re not tricking any of us; they’re being very smart with how they’re saying it.’ ”

It reminded me of how Majdi talked about her trainees’ “legacies.” Though it didn’t occur to me until later that in Jon’s metaphor, the “employees” are actually paying customers.

I later spoke to a man named Nic who was in my Basic, and who was on the verge of completing his Legacy training. “This literally saved me from so much pain in my life,” he texted me after our interview. “Whether you believe it or not, this workshop changes lives for the better.”

I have to admit, the day I quit M.I.T.T., I almost drove back and rejoined.

I was messed up about it for about a week.

A few weeks after my training, I met up with Sonja, the woman who introduced me to M.I.T.T. “I missed you at graduation,” she said. She explained she’d gone to the final day of my training; it was going to be her big surprise. I asked how it felt not seeing me there. “I was sad,” she said. “I felt like you got off the roller-coaster before it got good.”

Like Jon and Nic, Sonja was gung-ho for M.I.T.T. She said her experiences led her to initiate deeper conversations with her family. As a graphic designer, she thought M.I.T.T. had improved her work. “I actually have a vision for the world now,” she explained.

I said that I found the training troubling on several fronts. The tax on people’s minds and feelings. The trainer’s and staff’s lack of expertise in mental health. What I disliked most, I said, was the message I received, imparted through hours of conjured spontaneity, that this system was the best solution for damaged people to repair their lives, and yet its methods, cloaked in a secrecy better suited to a magic trick, had been developed by a con man, repackaged by a hairdresser, and was guarded by an unpaid staff of fervent recruits.

“It sounds like you don’t believe other people had authentic experiences,” Sonja said. I likened it to a horror movie. A good director can set up a film so viewers are terrified at precise moments. That doesn’t make the audience’s fear less authentic, but it’s still by design. Because I was sure many people found M.I.T.T. valuable in the glow of their sudden self-awareness, and possibly for long after. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t potentially dangerous, maybe very dangerous, for plenty more.

Needless to say, Sonja disagreed. She is still involved with M.I.T.T.

In the months since my training, knowing that more trainings were taking place in a dark room nearby, I wondered: Can participants say no when they want to? The success of M.I.T.T. relies on a troubling premise: To get anything out of it, you need to yield to all of it, despite rarely knowing what comes next. It turns the idea of consent into one more like submission. The pressure inside the room to conform is intense. Submit and be revealed. Submit and be rewarded. Submit so that your problems finally can be cured. Whereas saying no flies in the face of the training. ‘No’ isn’t “giving it your all.“ ‘No’ impedes the training for 149 other people. ‘No’ suggests you don’t take on faith that the technology is profound.

Of all the things I tried that May, the one thing most unlike M.I.T.T. in many ways was Ecstatic Dance. Ecstatic Dance is where a large group of people gather to dance for several hours. No drugs, no alcohol, no talking. The point is to lose yourself in the music and avoid interfering with other people’s experiences. Picture a rave but sober, with a greater attempt to escape your conscious mind. After my first time doing it, a friend said, “Do you realize your eyes are glowing?”

The day I quit M.I.T.T., a dance was scheduled near UCLA. The air was dimly golden. The music was very loud. I danced for two hours without stopping, until my clothes were soaked with sweat, until the DJ finished his set with a dub song, a trip-hop song, then a brief moment of silence, which became a voice slowly descending from heaven, “Simply Beautiful” by Al Green.

I happen to love Al Green. My wife introduced me to his records; Al Green means a lot to both of us. And after all those hours of emotional meddling in the dark, tears filled my eyes. Simply put, I was wrecked. I sat on the floor. Dancers moved around me while I cried for the umpteenth time. Of all of the month’s tears, these were the sweetest. To be so shaken, to experience a response so authentically mine, in a room full of people also spontaneously affected—the feeling was the opposite of every moment from that week. Because to be moved is very different from being manipulated.

The dance finished a few minutes later. The sky was purple and pale. If this was my cult, my L.A. people, my roots in the soil, so be it. Al Green is good.

Rosecrans Baldwin’s latest novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. His next book, a work of nonfiction about Los Angeles County, is forthcoming from MCD x Farrar, Straus and Giroux.