48: Traumatic Influence (w/Kyra Haglund & Hala Khouri)
Teal Swan’s suicide-teasing trauma pseudo-therapy has cast a spell over millions. Kaia Ra is an up-and-coming contender, selling divine jewelry and a channeled text about how to transcend QAnon-type nightmares. Both claim to be survivors of long-term Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien ambassadors. Both have capitalized on the chaos of 2020.We discuss the trend of trauma exploitation, Satanic Panics throughout the decades, and social media entertainment finding cover through the pretense of therapy. Then we’ll hear from the pros: licensed psychologists Hala Khouri and Kyra Haglund join Julian to discuss the importance of trauma-informed yoga and cases of abuse in wellness spaces.In the Ticker, Derek examines the snake oil of Luke Storey, Julian reviews the “Health and Freedom” conference recently held in a Bible college in Tulsa, and Matthew worries about QAnons in Toronto who have started speaking in tongues. We’ll also discuss a new phenomenon amongst anti-vaxxers: “Reverse Contagion Anxiety”, which leads them to believe that merely being around vaccinated people will make them infertile or re-organize their DNA. (We can only hope.)CW: Audio clips from Lin Wood and Kaia Ra describing sexual / satanic ritual abuse of children in the context of QAnon mythology (Wood), and personal origin story (Ra).Show NotesLuke Storey wants to sell you a pyramid schemeElectromagnetic Fields & Parental Panics: A case study in how science can bring comfortReporter Sean O’Shea gets yelled at in tonguesSgt. Brown gets suspended for hugging anti-maskersWhen QAnon Came to Canada@selfhealingmama Chloe Angeline with a dire womb-warningChristiane Northrup as Vaccine LysistrataGizmodo investigative podcast series on Teal SwanBackstory on Barbara SnowAffidavit: Snow threatens family members, trashes houseSnow tes
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Conspirituality 48, Traumatic Influence with Hala Khouri and Kira Haglund.
Teal Swan's suicide-teasing trauma pseudo-therapy has cast a spell over millions.
Kaya Ra is an up-and-coming contender selling divine jewelry and a channeled text about how to transcend QAnon-type nightmares.
Both claim to be survivors of long-term satanic ritual abuse and alien ambassadors.
Both have capitalized on the chaos of 2020.
We discuss the trend of trauma exploitation, satanic panics throughout the decades, and social media entertainment finding cover through the pretense of therapy.
Then we'll hear from the pros.
Therapists Hala Khouri and Kira Hagland join me to discuss the importance of trauma-informed yoga and cases of abuse in wellness spaces.
In the ticker, Derek examines the snake oil of Luke's story, I'll be reviewing the fantastic Health and Freedom Conference recently held in a Bible college in Tulsa, and Matthew worries about QAnons in Toronto who've started speaking in tongues.
We'll also discuss a new phenomenon amongst anti-vaxxers that Matthew has coined as reverse contagion anxiety, which leads them to believe that merely being around vaccinated people will make them infertile or reorganize their DNA.
We can hope.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
First up on the ticker, let's talk about Luke's story.
Covering conspiritualist downlines is an important aspect of this podcast.
Listen to what they say, then watch what they sell has been a mantra for me over this past year.
So let's consider Luke Story, who runs the Life Stylist podcast out of Austin.
He's featured some of the biggest names in conspirituality, including J.P.
Sears, Joe Dispenza, Byron Katie, Zach Bush, Aubrey Marcus, David Wolfe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alongside lesser-mentioned conspiritualists like Dave Asprey, who we did discuss once, and Mastin Kipp, so he's pretty embedded in the scene.
He also has quite the grift going himself.
Recently, Luke posted about his new best friend, the Soma Vedic Crystal Pyramid Scheme, I mean pyramid, which I think looks like a participation trophy in the Yoga Olympics, though Matthew better explains it as a Star Trek wedding cake.
You're right, that's it.
Here's Luke describing it himself, quote, I've never been a huge crystal guy, but after falling in love with their EMF mitigation devices, I'm sold that this badass piece is going to have a positive energetic impact on the home and 4VV aesthetic vibe.
He continues, quote, The theories on the power of pyramids are numerous and hard to verify, but the Egyptians and all the other civilizations that built them must have done so for a reason.
So maybe one reason is those are the buildings that they can construct at that time in history.
And I know that many people romanticize ancient pyramids, but I never hear those same people talk about the slave labor that went into building them.
So think about closer to home.
The entire American economy and infrastructure system was created by slavery and later by immigrants bought into indentured servitude.
You know, what wellness influencers call being a digital gypsy and living a nomadic lifestyle.
But seriously, their privilege is literally built on blood and death.
But, you know, live your best life ever, I guess.
So, back to Luke.
He goes on to say that Soma Vedic just conducted a couple fascinating scientific studies in which they, quote, proved faster cell regeneration and wound healing in a high EMF environment, as well as a 2x increase in negative ions in the air.
Negative is good in this case, thank you.
You science geeks can find the studies on their site for reference, end quote.
Well, thank you, Luke.
I think I will check out those studies.
And I did.
So, Soma Vedic's site is a trip.
Apparently, their devices create a 2,800 square foot energy field that forms a bubble and penetrates walls, while creating a coherent life-supporting field that mitigates the negative effects of 5G, So the 2800 square feet though, isn't that the typical size of a McMansion?
of the pseudoscience field of geobiology, free radicals and oxidative stress, and can even harmonize tap water.
So the 2,800 square feet though, isn't that the typical size of a McMansion?
Isn't that the square footage of like, that's where it starts.
That's where they start.
Yeah.
So at least give you that coverage.
Now, is this the moment where we announce that we have an endorsement deal with these people and they're funding us?
That's coming, Julian!
Why you gotta ruin everything?
Jesus!
Well, there's more of their claims, but let's get to the science.
The first study is, I kid you not, posted on a Shopify link, which basically says everything.
But next, I did what you should always do when reading literature.
I investigated the journal.
And the first thing I noticed about this supposed peer-reviewed journal is that the sole author of this paper has previously written solo papers on the healing powers of asparagus And antioxidant potential of spirulina.
Now, let me point out that the giant red flag is that almost every one of this guy's papers that I could find was only authored by him.
Now, even more interestingly, this particular paper on Somavitic was received by the journal on December 17th, 2020, accepted on December 20th, and published on December 25th.
December 20th and published on December 25th.
Oh my God.
Slow week.
It was a slow week.
Wow.
So actual peer review takes months to, you know, actually peer review the study.
And so the Journal of Biomedical Science and Research is a complete sham, a pay-to-publish journal designed for companies just like Soma Veda to claim credibility.
The editor's page on the site is a broken link.
The membership page is not.
So, with an annual subscription, you get a banner ad on their site, which is, of course, all science journals do that.
And with a five-year membership, you get a 15% discount on a stall at one of the organization's conferences, and that membership costs $16,000.
So, let's go back to the study.
Quote, based on the results of both tests, the use of the Medic Amber, which is the brand name of one of SomaVedic's products, can be recommended to reduce the effects of mobile phone radiation.
Now, I've never seen any credible scientific literature conclude with a sales pitch, but maybe I'm just a little too geeky for Luke's downline.
But there's more.
In fact, there's four scientific studies on the site.
Let's just consider one other.
And this gem was published in the International Society for Electrosmog Research, an association linked with You guessed it.
Activist groups that warn about cell towers.
In fact, it doesn't even appear that they have a journal at all.
Their name is just plastered on the SomaVedic site alongside a PDF posted to a Google Drive written by a cannabis researcher who supposedly conducted some sort of aura photography of five breast cancer patients with no control involved.
You might need to replay that sentence a few times, but that's the study.
Now the study concludes, after the therapy of somavedic medic device, each patient showed a significant improvement of sedimentation.
All patients subjectively feel rested and fit.
Improvement of sedimentation?
What was sedimenting?
I should have shared this study with you guys.
I will though, because they're mostly photos with about 10 lines of text, you know, peer-reviewed science.
So Luke, Okay, being geeky and all, I did look into some actual scientific literature and came across a 2015 study from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology that included researchers from Kansas State University and the U.S.
Naval Research Laboratory, and it was published in one of the largest physics journals in the world.
Mainstream.
They discovered that anisotropic crystals can absorb radiation without destructive interference of electromagnetism.
So that means that they can absorb it without breaking apart the actual crystal or the actual radiation.
Now this paper was received on August 12th revised on October 13th and published on November 9th, which is how the publication process in science actually goes.
Yeah, that's actually pretty quick, too.
That is still quick.
Yes, that is true.
I've seen ones take up to six months for a review.
Now, we can safely say that certain crystals absorb electromagnetic energy.
That is true.
But, well, I'll let Harvard PhD Julie Fransvee Hawley explain, and I've linked to her article in Skeptic Magazine in the show notes.
Quote, Collectively, the evidence on EMF does not meet the well-established Bradford Hill criteria used to determine causality, whether or not the exposure in question actually causes a disease.
There is no known biological mechanism for non-ionizing EMF, such as power lines, cell phones, and Wi-Fi, to cause DNA damage, and thus cancer.
End quote.
And I'll follow that up by stating that while certain crystals absorb EMFs, there's no known mechanism, especially on the consumer market, for protecting biological entities, such as humans, from radiation.
Energy fields make for good science fiction, but not science.
But I don't think Luke is actually concerned about science when he shares his code for 17% off the toy pyramid.
In fact, Luke's store is filled with pseudoscience tchotchkes.
There's a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, a variety of blue light blocking devices, all sorts of nootropics.
He's big on those.
in plain sight.
All right.
In fact, Luke's store is filled with pseudoscience tchotchkes.
There's a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, a variety of blue light blocking devices, all sorts of nootropics.
He's big on those probiotics for pets and a human charger, which shoots white light into your ear canal to activate the creation of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline.
In In total, there are 188 items for achieving optimal health available in Luke's store.
At least we know a few Austin billionaires are going to live to be a thousand thanks to this lifestylist downline.
But seriously, if you need that much protection against the toxic environment that engulfs us, how poor is your health to begin with?
So this might sound like a non sequitur, but I'm listening to the list of products and I can't stop myself from thinking about how much my children, who are four and eight, really love Lego.
Like, they really love it.
It comes in boxes that contain worlds for them, and it all links together, and they can indulge in these wonderful fantasies after the sets are put together.
There's a Ninjago world, a Star Trek world, there's a Harry Potter world.
It's kind of like I'm trying to see the real daylight between that kind of consumption and the pleasure of creating fantasy worlds out of all of the same stuff, all of the same premises.
I'm trying to see the daylight between that and what the sort of geeky wellness shopping list offers.
And it's kind of hard for me.
And after a while, I can't imagine also that any of these products on their own have much of a lasting power.
Like how long would you be interested in the Soma Vedic Pyramid once you'd bought it?
Like, how long would it have to pretend to work for you before you kind of forgot about it?
Or, you know, with the Lego set, you lost the assembly book, and you lost the box, and all of the pieces just sort of ended up in, like, the bucket at the bottom of the closet?
I feel like the New Age tickle trunk is kind of like...
A bucket of Lego where all of the pieces are kind of disassembled and we kind of forgot what was interesting about them to begin with.
But I think the main thing is just consumption, right?
Like I can't get over the... I can't see the difference really between what my children want and what I end up consuming too much of and what's on offer here.
One thing we talk about a lot at my job at Centered, being a technology company, is the importance of creating habits.
So in everything that we're doing, not we, I mean collectively as a society, we produce these new products over and over again.
And what really matters is when something becomes sticky.
And in order to become sticky, it needs to become a habit.
Now, in order to create new habits, you usually are replacing other habits.
And so there's a There's a process that happens where there has to be a comparable reward for the habit you're replacing for the new habit to stick.
To put into context, we're a flow state app and we're trying to help people get into flow while they're working in monotask instead of multitasking.
And so if you can create a powerful enough incentive to help people not multitask but actually get more work done by monotasking, that reward will stick.
And when I see everything in this downline or what you just talked about, Matthew, about things that are just here and then gone is because none of them actually stick.
They come, they make people feel better for a couple weeks or months, however long the placebo lasts.
And then they're flooded with more things that'll make them even healthier.
So, I would argue, you know, for example, people who've practiced yoga for decades, that has stuck and that brings them some sort of reward when they're doing it.
But when you're talking about these tchotchkes, these things that I'm looking at that are so ridiculous in their health claims, it's just, and they're constant.
He's relentless.
Every week there's a couple of new tchotchkes and it's like, I really mean what I said.
How poor is your health that you need to optimize everything constantly to always be climbing somewhere to a ladder that never actually ends?
Yeah, so the lack of sustainability or whatever we want to call it is a feature, not a bug.
What's actually sticky is not the lifespan or the interest in the product after you've bought it.
What's sticky is the endless desire for the next thing that's going to optimize you to another level.
Yes, that's the whole nootropics.
That's all I see when they're being discussed because there's always some new herb.
There's always something that will just give you like a 1% more increase that hooks people and it is relentless in the marketing.
I mean, it does seem that the marketer's primary challenge this day, today, is to distract us from the nausea of thinking about the excesses of consumption.
But, you know, most marketers, I think, are kind of at least honest about that whole deal and paradoxically about what they're hiding because the pitch is pleasure.
You know, like, this car will give you this type of feeling and this electronic device will give you this type of feeling.
You know, with stories stuff, you really have this paradox of consumption and wellness and spirituality that where the lie has to be larger than that, that it has to make you feel not just pleasured, but virtuous.
The premise is that, you know, this will make you a better human being and that will make the world a better place.
And that you really deserve self-care because if you get self-care, you will be a better person and you'll be able to affect more people positively.
And I just can't imagine...
How many people sit with the Soma Veda Pyramid in the corner of their room and then at a certain point, like, look over at it and feel like it's laughing at them in a way, right?
And also that it's just not going to break down.
Like, it will last like a pyramid, I guess.
I also want to point out that your assumption is right, and that is the marketing pitch, but you're actually wrong.
People don't become better humans through self-care.
They become self-absorbed with it.
People become, and research backs this up, that people become better humans collectively when they take part in charitable endeavors.
When they go and actually go to hospice or go to cleanups, that is actually sustainable and that makes them feel better.
This self-care regimen that's being produced in the wellness industry is completely rooted in self-absorption.
Up next on the ticker, evangelical nightmares.
One thing we can reliably predict is that failed prophecy only dampens the spirit for so long.
It took a while, but like all doomsday cults, QAnon has found its inevitable moment of resurrection.
In the wake of Joe Biden becoming president, Hillary Clinton is still walking free while 377 Capitol insurrectionists await their trial.
Most normies in the world are now familiar with Ron Watkins via Cullen Hoback's HBO unmasking of Q as the vacuous sociopath who played Kung Fu Pied Piper while double-screening porn and getting off on watching The World Born.
But never mind that unfunny joker, because Rhema Bible College in Tulsa, Oklahoma hosted a revival this past weekend that I am officially renaming as Medical Quacks and Religious Grifters for Q.
Over 4,200 true believers packed the sold-out two-tier amphitheater for the Health and Freedom Conference that was also live-streamed on multiple platforms.
The event was apparently organized in under a month by Clay Clark, the business coach who runs Thrive Time Show, a podcast for entrepreneurs with attached business conferences and online courses, naturally.
Noteworthy, as I looked at the obligatory testimonial section on Clay Clark's website, there's a quote from the founder and senior pastor of Life Church about having grown to 30 locations using Clark's entrepreneurial methods.
But on stage at Health & Freedom, everyone from former National Security Advisor and General Mike Flynn, to pillow guy and aspiring social media platform owner Mike Lindell, to Hugo Chavez rigged the 2020 election from Beyond the Grave conspiracist Sidney Powell, to chiropractor Cordy Williams, better known as the megaphone Marine, delivered a herky-jerky symphony of COVID denial, election fraud, and take-back-our-country right-wing Christian nationalism.
But the high note was always child sex trafficking, and the soloist who shone the brightest was a certain Lucian Lincoln, otherwise known as Lynn, Wood.
He's that lawyer, remember, that Mickey Willis has said is doing such fine work.
Like what, you may ask?
Oh, accusing SCOTUS Justice Roberts of being involved in the QAnon cabal, or calling for Mike Pence to face a firing squad and the arrest of Mitch McConnell for treason.
Also, accusing Georgia Governor Mike Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of collaborating with the Chinese to rig the election.
So here's Lin Wood in full Q preacher mode in the video most shared on social media with the hashtag health and freedom conference.
And I should warn you, this is graphic and disturbing.
So you may want to fast forward for around two minutes if you'd rather not.
It's also been described as the Great Awakening because you're getting ready to learn that God is real.
That's the Second Harvest.
But you're going to be awakened to this fact.
That just as God is real, the devil is real.
And the devil's children are going to be exposed.
Every lie will be revealed.
They're killing our children.
Send them to jail.
Put them in front of a firing squad.
They are committing acts against humanity.
The penalty for an act against humanity is death.
Take them out!
For every little child that has suffered and is suffering tonight, for every little child that doesn't know how to get home, for every little child that goes to bed at night after being tortured and abused and just wants to see their mom and dad and their family, you fight for those children.
Don't you ever quit fighting for those little children!
Because this is America.
This is America.
In America, we do not tolerate crimes against humanity.
And if you're torturing and terrorizing a child, and having sex with a child, and actually murdering a child, and eating parts of a child, and using the body parts of that child, that is a crime against humanity, and we're not gonna tolerate it!
Not in America!
Not in the country formed by God Almighty!
And for those of you that do, watch out!
Because God's judgment is coming!
He's going to lift up his children, and he's going to crush those devil worshippers.
Now, that was a lot to sit through, and I do apologize, but that's the general tone in addition to the high point of this entire conference.
Holy shit.
Yeah, who knew that a defamation lawyer could step so seamlessly into being an evangelical terror preacher?
I'm usually against longer clips, as I've said before, you know, just because it's a lot of it's a lot of real estate.
But I'm glad you played that one in full just because and it actually is longer.
I mean, his whole thing was a sermon.
I mean, it really I had no idea that he was that influenced by the evangelical church and he he brought it.
That was kind of the I guess you can call it the highlight of the conference.
Yeah, he's also on the verge of tears at the climax of that clip, which was... Oh, come on.
Oh, well, whatever.
I mean, who knows?
Who knows?
No, not real tears, but that's part of the performative aspect.
I mean, he has that.
He's good.
It was Jimmy Swagger.
Honestly, when I was watching him, I was watching Jimmy Swagger in pantomime, in delivery and everything.
It was right there.
Which is why it was so widely shared.
Now the other clip that a lot of people shared was of actor Jim Goviziel, who by the way is not Jesus, but he did play Jesus in Mel Gibson's torture porn masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ.
He joined remotely to the huge applause that made it seem as if maybe he was actually Jesus.
How do you know he's not?
Well, I mean, we should stay open-minded on that fact, I guess.
He talks in detail from the big screen, while also choking back tears, about how adrenochrome is harvested by pedophile elites.
I really thought we were getting past this at some point.
This was all as part of promoting his new action film about child sex trafficking.
At one point, Caviezel declares, kind of similar to Lin Wood, that there will be no mercy for these people.
And guess what?
Christiane Northrup was there, of course, and she shared on her Instagram a video of Martin Luther King speaking about the struggle for freedom, and that was being played to the cheering white conservative audience.
Thankfully, in a show of rare self-reflection, she later removed that post.
Unsurprisingly, the event ended with a mask burning, a ceremonial mask burning, but They started off each day with the blowing of a ram's horn, also called a Jewish shofar.
These folks have quite a knack for unconscious irony, don't they?
I'll point out, I've mentioned Frances Fitzgerald's book, The Evangelicals, before on the pod and I'll reference it again because she does a really good job of showing how In the original literature of the Bible, there was no, or actually, I'm sorry, in the book of Job in that particular story, Satan wasn't originally a character.
And that was later added because a few centuries later, the organization of the church realized that if they wanted to put forward God as the ultimate figurehead, they needed an ultimate evil.
But all of these supposed evangelicals who are originalists of the Bible are actually pulling from something that was contrived later on.
And they play it to a tee, and I see it all the time, but it's really unfortunate that they constantly lie about the origins of their own faith just to put forward their own messaging.
Yeah, they're also hearkening back to ancient Sumeria, right?
It's angry Mainyu against Ahura Mazda.
You have these figures of darkness and light that don't really appear in the Bible until much later interpretations.
Oh, but even though, I mean, in all of those, it was known that those were necessary components of each other and they blended like the yin and yang.
I mean, Asian literature is filled with that, the blending.
A lot of other cultures, and it's very hard when you live in one society to grok this, but a lot of other cultures don't have the neuroses around death and around evil that America has specifically because of the telling of the biblical stories that we've concocted beginning in Europe and then You know, translating to 19th century America, especially the revival movements.
And that's where we've come across this idea that there's some ultimate evil, but historically, and even right now globally, most cultures don't really think about it that way.
I can't stop thinking about the 4200 people in that Bible College amphitheater and how many of them And how few of them will be able to really come to grips with that.
And I don't know, like I guess the person that I fixate on most, just because I feel very familiar with her, Being in that audience is Christiane Northrup because we've followed her so often and spent sort of, you know, hundreds of hours, the three of us, looking at her materials.
Do you guys feel like some sort of personal identification with her at all at this point?
Like, do you feel like you know her a little bit in the same way?
Not in the way that a follower would know her.
I mean, I mentioned it before.
She has taken my yoga class, so I did meet her once.
Her daughter was a regular student of mine, and I learned about her work through her daughter.
I think about that time 14 years ago, however long it was, and then now what it's transformed into.
But it's not like I paid her close attention back then, her work.
Seeing what this has become, there is a personal touch to me in that element, but it's really, honestly, you guys do more of the heavy lifting with her videos than I do, but it's actually really hard for me to watch her because just listening to what she says, I just have to turn it off.
It's kind of sad, if nothing else.
Yeah, I feel more of a personal connection with her, I think, than with anyone else we cover.
Yeah, I mean, this was really brought home to me when I watched a few clips of this conference a little bit too late in the day after the sun went down.
And I think I saw the screenshot of Or maybe it was Northrop posted it to her Instagram, a shot of herself drinking a bottle of water and cheering somebody on.
It might have been Lynne Wood during the baby-eating thing.
Who knows?
We're not sure of the moment.
But, anyway, I actually had a dream that featured her that night, and it was quite haunting, but also kind of funny, because I dreamt that she contracted COVID in Tulsa, and that she kept doing her Great Awakening videos every day.
In more and more of a, like, of an ill and finally degraded state.
And, you know, she would be talking about how the sensations, you know, she's desaturating her oxygen and she's getting faint and lightheaded, but she would be playing her harp, but she would be missing notes, and she would be even more sort of garbled than she usually was in bouncing back and forth from topic to topic.
And then at one point, somebody, she kind of said, because she always maintains this sort of like veneer of medical competency, I'm watching a video in my dream and she says, well, you know, so-and-so sent me a pulse oximeter.
I've put it on my finger.
So she puts it on her finger and then she shows the camera and it's at like 65 or something like that.
And that's not concerning to her.
She starts doing fucking numerology on the oxygen saturation.
Right?
And so she's making this and then she starts talking about how when the oxygen gets to some magical number like 36 that the ascension will be complete or something like that.
And yeah, it was really- Probably better you don't do psychedelics, Matthew.
Like I don't need to.
Before we move on, though, I do want to point out for listeners that Lin Wood, to make that connection, is who Mickey Willis has been working with for months now.
And in late December, Mickey announced that he was working on a media project with this man.
So put that into context from the creator of the Plandemic.
To this person and how closely they've worked together on the Kyle Rittenhouse videos and supporting the people, I forget his name, but the kid who sued CNN and the Washington Post for their coverage when he was yelling at an indigenous man in D.C.
and they work together on these projects.
So I think it's important to connect those dots.
*music* Is this okay with you, Sergeant?
Yeah.
Get away from me.
Get away from me.
Is it okay with you, Sergeant?
You condone that, Sergeant?
I don't condone it.
That's why I started to come over.
You're standing here videotaping, and obviously you're agitating this group.
I'm not agitating.
I'm standing back here.
I know, but they obviously have a problem with you.
I don't know if you have a problem with them.
I'm a journalist.
I'm doing my job, Sergeant.
Right.
Sergeant 1889, Sean O'Shea, global news.
I'm doing my job.
So that's the sound of a very angry woman storming up on Sean O'Shea, who's a veteran Toronto, uh, TV reporter for Global News.
He's filming an anti-lockdown protest at Huff Gym in Mississauga, which is a West End suburb of Toronto.
Now, the owners of Huff Gym have defied lockdown orders and have so far evaded ticketing or prosecution.
The arguments are familiar.
They say everyone is an essential worker.
Our health is our responsibility.
Working out is crucial.
Obviously, it's not something they can do in a park.
And restrictions are fascism or communism.
They're not quite sure, but the restrictions are bad.
But something that most reports missed is that the woman who is charging Sean is wearing a hoodie that says, Hugs Not Masks.
And this is a national anti-mask and anti-lockdown group that organizes with The Line Canada, which is our homegrown QAnon affiliate.
Now, I reported on The Line in The Walrus.
So, it's not surprising to me to see this kind of peak conspirituality performance here with an incantation being recited against an agent of the fake news.
And, you know, she got away with it because the cop actually defended her, as you can hear.
But the cop, you can hear him in the clip, he's Sergeant Paul Brown, and he's now been suspended for obviously taking sides with the woman.
Not just for that.
Later, he was filmed without a mask, hugging the anti-mask protesters and posing with them for selfies.
So it's, you know, super gross to think of this guy getting into a squad car with another officer and sharing donuts or pulling you over and leaning into your window.
And yeah, chances are good that Brown is a QAnon sympathizer.
Shouldn't be surprised that they're on the force here in Toronto as well.
So, we here at Conspirituality Podcast are ambivalently proud to have brought you the concept of Disaster Spirituality, which is the phenomenon where conspiritualists jump into the maw of a sociopolitical catastrophe like COVID to sell turmeric tablets and salvation.
We're sorry to present a new term today, which is Reverse Contagion Anxiety.
So, currently, in all of the typical conspirituality hotspots and circle jerks, we have a lot of influencers turning epidemiology inside out.
So it wasn't enough for them to ignore or contradict public health officials, or make up ulterior motives for them, or even blend in Q delusions about the vaccine microchip agenda.
Now they've turned the vaccine itself into the virus and abandoned the dictum to refuse to live in fear because now they are terrified of people who are vaccinated.
So here's a clip from Self Healing Mama on Instagram.
She also goes by Chloe Angeline.
She dubs herself as somebody who sells conscious pregnancy and birth and motherhood.
She's a cosmic doula through the portal of motherhood.
She writes, I'm here to birth a new earth.
So here's her panic sermon that went viral this week with 357,000 views.
Right now, this thing that is being pushed on us, okay, this jab, you know what I'm talking about, it's been out for a couple months now.
And in the fertility and pregnancy community and women's health community, something is happening behind the scenes that we need to talk about.
Now I'm bringing this up and it's very uncomfortable for me, but I know that it's important as a leader in women's reproductive health that I need to share this message.
So please share this with everybody that you know.
Women, in their menstruating years and not are experiencing severe side effects from people around them having received this jab.
We're not quite sure what's happening here.
It's happening too quick for us to really know.
But what's happening is women's periods and their menstrual cycles are being significantly affected, even if they haven't received it themselves.
So let me repeat, women who are in a community where people around them have recently been, gotten the jab, right?
You know what I'm talking about.
Even if they're just around them, something is happening with their periods.
We're having women miss their periods.
We're having women have the most excruciating periods of their life, to the point where they're bleeding so profusely that it is completely out of character.
Okay?
Women who are in menopause have gotten their period back, and in women's health care, I'm not a doctor so you know I'm a holistic reproductive practitioner doula etc but in this community something that's well known is that if a woman bleeds and she is postmenopausal that it is cancer so something is going on Please send this message to every woman that you know.
This is an outcry, okay?
This isn't about conspiracy theories.
This is about standing up for the health of humanity.
And I am willing to stand up here on my soapbox and beg for women's rights and talk about this day and night.
I will stand up for you because something is happening behind the scenes and they're coming after Women's Health.
So this is coming from a total Pastel Q account.
Angeline offers gorgeous interiors, lots of woven dreamcatchers on the wall behind the master bed, tasteful motherhood nudes, and just after this, actually, she goes on to say that the COVID vaccine is lowering sperm counts, which kind of underlines the point that these people are just fucking obsessed with making babies.
So Angeline's pseudoscience builds on layer upon layer of previous anti-vax claims and panics.
So firstly the claim that the mRNA vaccine changes your DNA.
This is not true.
The claim that the vaccine is live and so that it can shed virus.
That's also wrong but of course if it did shed live virus The proponent of this belief would have to forget prior denials or minimizations of the virus.
Thirdly, the claim that the shed virus is secreting from sweat glands and pheromones.
This is not a thing.
Fourthly, they connect social media collected anecdotes.
So, you know, this person is a little nauseous, this person has disturbed sleep or is anxious, they had a bad period, to being increasingly surrounded by vaccinated people.
So, they won't consider that the symptoms are the psychosomatic effects of cognitive dissonance or the social isolation or even guilt and shame of being an anti-vaxxer.
It also can't be the stress of the pandemic, either, because the pandemic is a hoax.
Then what happens is that the argument has to invent an escalation of the vaccine agenda, which means that even if you are exercising your right to not be vaccinated, you are still at the mercy of the medical state and your fellow citizens.
So there's no escape.
So this is where spiritual solutions will be very attractive.
And then, if you tie all of this together with the hottest button issue available in women's wellness spaces, which is reproductive health, you can use a bunch of pseudo-feminist language—choice, believing women, sovereignty—as though anti-vax women are being assaulted by the vaccine miasma floating around out there.
So, I'm sure we'll be doing more on reverse contagion anxiety soon, but three points to leave this off with.
Firstly, I think it's really disturbing to think about how self-isolating and socially polarizing this development is.
You know, for years we've been talking about vax hesitancy, usually framed as a question of how a population relates to the state through public health.
But with this stuff, we're really talking about a kind of horizontal violence, as if we're not fractured enough, and also taking place between parents and within communities.
Now, on Medium, I published an analysis of how Christiane Northrup is mobilizing this argument to actually advise that her anti-vax followers, who are mainly women, withhold sex from partners who want to be or are vaccinated.
And my article points out that it's a mainstay of cultic leaders to try to control the sex lives of followers.
The objective is to make sure there are no intimate bonds between followers than the bonds they should be forming with the leader or with the ideology.
And finally I'll say, it's becoming increasingly clear to me how politically retrograde all of this is, how socially conservative, how under the veil of women's empowerment there's this whole discourse that has emerged that really puts all of women's value into having babies and being super uber moms.
And so in that context, the panic around the depopulation agenda makes a lot of sense, because if you've narrowed your self-worth down to having tons of earth babies and I'm going to feed them from my organic life, any hint at the fact that there are just too many human beings on the planet will probably feel like a spiritual attack.
I mean, what really has a depopulation agenda is climate collapse.
So, if you've boxed yourself into parenthood as some kind of influencer gig, and because Instagram allows you to monetize anything, and then you catch a glimpse of the fact that the worst thing you can do for the planet as a rich white person is to have more than one child to replace you, I can imagine the guilt and shame of making babies for social validation would bite pretty hard.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
I want to start by acknowledging Dr. Jen Gunter's writing on the topics we've been covering so far.
Listeners might know her as the OBGYN with the most on-point critiques of Gwyneth Paltrow's goop pseudoscience.
Last week on the Jab, I mentioned her excellent piece about menstrual irregularities as a side effect of the COVID vaccines.
Gunter expressed her frustration at the lack of scientific study and public health communication about what she described as most likely a harmless, if unpleasant and alarming immune response, and how it could easily be used to piggyback anti-vax conspiracy theories regarding pregnancy and fertility.
Well, as if on cue, the piggybacking has been in full effect, and she has a new piece published Monday night addressing the fear-mongering about this kind of magical vaccine contagion.
The piece is titled, The COVID-19 Vaccine is a Vaccine, Not a Spell.
It Can't Affect Another Person's Menstrual Cycle or Fertility by Proxy.
Quoting here from her intro, Gunter writes, Neither of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, which use messenger RNA, nor the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which uses a viral vector, can possibly affect a person who has not been vaccinated, and this includes their menstruation, fertility, and pregnancy.
She goes on to describe the spike protein genetic codes delivered by each of the vaccine mechanisms as being like IKEA instructions that are delivered to your house so you can build your furniture, and afterward they get taken out with the trash.
And that's it.
She name-checks Christiane Northrup and Naomi Wolf for spreading claims that menstrual irregularities, which can be part of an immune response to the vaccines, as well as infertility and miscarriages, which are not related, can be passed between women.
I'll include a link in the show notes to this full article.
One topic we cover a lot on this podcast is how charismatic influence often bleeds over into the presumption of authority on multiple topics.
This is of course especially apparent under pandemic conditions in which self-styled spiritual teachers or alternative healers feel entitled to contradict epidemiologists and reinterpret public health Through a conspiracy lens and fringe medical doctors for their part wax poetic about near-death experiences or endorse alien channels.
But what about those alien channels?
What about the position of spiritual authority woven entirely from the fabric of algorithmic omnipresence and the autopoiesis of personal mythology?
What happens when that personal mythology is equal parts traumatizing horror story and well-crafted credibility marketing Aimed at a particularly vulnerable demographic.
We're going to talk about two influencers in this segment, and I should say at the top that we owe a debt of gratitude to Bea Schofield for her in-depth investigative journalism in both cases, and we'll link to those articles.
Welcome to your physical life.
Even though you don't remember it, You had specific intentions for what you wanted to experience in this life.
Some of you wanted a taste of true love.
Some of you to feel true freedom.
Some of you wanted a simple life or else the little things that matter.
Julian's dancing.
You chose the perfect family and the perfect initial experience for this intention you set for this life.
You knew all the potentials that would come from choosing those parents, that neighborhood, that culture, that place and that time.
When you saw that perfect potential, you took it.
You took it because you knew it would be the exact conditions necessary for your own personal expansion.
And there is no difference between your personal expansion and the universe's expansion.
When you expand, the universe expands.
When you learn, the universe learns.
So that is Teal Swan.
Alright, so that is Teal Swan.
She was born Mary Bosworth and has 1.2 million followers on Facebook and over 300,000 on Instagram.
To quote Schofield, she claims to have suffered 13 years of abuse in a child-murdering Mormon satanic cult, where she was apparently routinely tortured, sewn into a corpse for 12 hours, and made to torture other children.
Teal also says that she's a multidimensional Arcturian alien working with 11 other aliens in an intergalactic Greenpeace-type organization.
She says she has x-ray vision and hearing and that she can inject herself into people's brain stems.
With no training, qualifications, or oversight, Teal has developed her own signature process for healing deep trauma that she calls the Completion Process.
On her website, 50 practitioners are shown who are trained in the method.
She has also said that suicide is merely a reset button and, unsurprisingly, has had students kill themselves.
Teal invites followers to a $5,000 week-long curveball retreat at her Filia property in Costa Rica, where, as Gizmodo reported, some participants end up never leaving, choosing instead to live there and work for her as completely unpaid volunteers.
She also sells to Rodex online courses for around $200 each and frequency paintings that she claims are medicinal and will help people to manifest what they want in their lives via energetic entrainment.
Is that the painting behind you right now, Julian?
Is that what's always there?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I keep it close at all times.
I think what's so incredible about that opening clip, which I just ripped from the homepage on YouTube for Teal Swan, is that It's really, she seems, the entire text is offering this faux empowerment slash agency.
You knew what you were destined for.
You made these choices.
And yet, there's a real blade in there because what an incredible kind of influential induction into her mastery, her knowledge of what you're all about, right?
Like, she's using this second-person intrusive omniscient.
Like, the claims... I mean, she's not...
She's not saying anything negative or unappealing in that opening pitch, but she's also establishing absolute dominance over listeners.
Emotional dominance.
Yeah, absolute dominance, and I am in touch with this higher truth that you have not grasped yet, and grasping it is the way towards your healing and your freedom, even though the way towards your healing and freedom is actually recognizing the ways in which you are helpless in the face of unbearable suffering, right?
Right.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but her completion process involves digging deep to find and release suppressed memories of past abuse.
Is that the sort of keynote?
Yeah, so the gist I've gotten of it is it's uncovering suppressed memories and it also involves a kind of group therapy process that's similar to something I've seen called constellation therapy.
In which different members of the group will find themselves imagining how your family members may have treated you and acting that out for you in this kind of live in the moment intuitive group drama, psychodrama.
But in this case they even go so far as to say that they're actually channeling or being possessed by the family members and the abusers, right?
I mean, I think it's really important to note what I prepared for this segment is a little bit of a backstory for how Teal Swan is carrying on a theme that it looks like she directly inherited from the satanic panic catastrophe of the 80s and 90s via her therapist, who is a woman named Barbara Snow.
Snow was at the center of Utah's satanic panic scene in the 80s, provoking several investigations with her.
Very contagious accusations which were at times leveled against dozens of men in Mormon communities.
Now, Chief Deputy of Utah County Attorney Wayne Watson witnessed one of Dr. Snow's interviews and felt that she was pressuring children into disclosing abuse that they originally denied.
One girl even testified that she felt that Snow would not let her end the interview unless she lodged an accusation of ritual abuse.
And this scans against stories from that time of therapists, intrusive therapists actually offering candy or, you know, ice cream to children that gave them the correct story.
As well as police interview techniques that tended to be overly enthusiastic and they're leading the kids toward what they wanted them to say.
Now, one of Snow's cases got all the way to the Utah Supreme Court, which reversed the abuse conviction that had come from Snow's testimony.
And they really threw Snow's credibility into the trash heap by noting the followings.
So this is a quote from the transcript.
From the court ruling, she made bizarre factual correlations between, or no sorry, there were bizarre factual correlations between the many cases she was involved in and the case resulting in the defendant's trial that they all involved a neighborhood sex ring from 3 to 20 families, they all involved members of the same church including a significant number of religious leaders,
They all involve satanic rituals and neighborhood sex parties, and in all of the cases, the children taken to Barbara Snow for counseling have in turn identified other children and adults in the neighborhood.
In addition, the affidavit claims that several nearly identical allegations exist in several of these cases, and three of the cases allegedly include Prominent reference to playing with, consuming and bathing in human excrement.
Pictures drawn by some of the children in treatment with Barbara Snow in two of the cases are claimed to be identical.
There's men dressing in women's clothing in the stories.
The use of costumes and masks were described by children in two of the cases.
In three cases, the children described large groups of adults congregating for the purpose of abusing children and so on and so forth.
more of the details.
You get the picture because what we have is a kind of story machine that this person is at the center of.
I was very happy to find, you know, the Guardian featured our podcast last week, which was awesome.
But one awesome thing about the article was that they also featured Esther Perel, who I'm a big fan of her book and her podcast.
And, you know, And I just have to say, I think we're going to have to do an episode, and I've mentioned this before, about sex and about our hangups with sex.
Because one thing that kind of, we talked about religion underlying a lot of the themes, but sex comes up time and time again, and this whole idea of child trafficking compared to our Very American, very Western issues with sexuality, I think, is a piece of this story that we have to look into.
It's every time we're coming across these figures, it has to do with sex in some capacity.
And I want to dig into why that is more.
This is a perfect example of that.
Barbara Snow is clearly just absolutely obsessed, preoccupied, looking for it in every single kid that comes her way.
I'd be fascinated to know professional opinion on her if anyone's ever formed one.
Well, she helped convict a guy named Arden Brett Bullock of child abuse, and when he appealed, the judges did not side with him, but they noted Snow's tactics.
That she even testified, this is from her own testimony, that she was, quote, very aggressive in questioning of children, that she was, quote, relatively indifferent to what would happen to the perpetrator, and that she did not approach interview sessions, quote, with an open mind, but as an ally for the child.
Unquote.
And that she did not see herself as a fact collector like the police.
Dr. Snow also testified extensively about her interview techniques and she acknowledged that she did not record her interviews with the children, take notes, or write reports following the interviews.
Snow admitted that her own integrity was the only way of verifying what had happened during the interview sessions.
So, similarly, the defense team emphasized contradictions and inconsistencies in the boy's testimony, including the fact that one of the boys had retracted an allegation of abuse as being untrue.
Can I just say here, I think we're in such tricky territory, right, because there is the reality that horrible trauma happens and that there can be...
Secrecy and denial and all sorts of stuff going on, right, in dysfunctional families and in toxic communities.
But really, this kind of outlandish, these sorts of outlandish narratives and this kind of going in saying, you know, satanic ritual abuse happened, that's not a question.
The only question is how and by whom, right?
This way of approaching it actually gets in the way of people who really have been terribly traumatized from getting help and being believed.
Absolutely.
Now the cops even busted Snow for this because during one of the numerous investigations that she was involved in, this is from the Chicago Reader, quote, Utah police deliberately fed her false information to see if her suggestive interviewing techniques were influencing the children's allegations.
Soon enough, this information appeared in the answers of the children she interviewed.
But she also ripped up her own family over this stuff.
There were documents obtained by the publication Gray Faction from the Utah Department of Professional Licensing Social Work Board.
Snow was providing services to two of her own family members, a sister-in-law and her daughter, and had been treating family members for at least 15 years, which is a huge Boundary issue.
This treatment included hypnosis, which led to the supposed recovering of repressed memories of abuse by her brother, the father of one of the children involved.
And the allegations were never evidenced, but this led to an incident in which Snow ended up violently confronting her family members, smashing through her brother's house with a baseball bat.
There's also a familiar tie-in here that Snow alleged that her family members had been subjected to military-tested programs, so there's shades of MKUltra as well.
Snow's professional board put her license under probation, but as of 2018, her record comes back clean in a license search.
Now, all of the reports that I just quoted from are only accessible through the Wayback Machine, which makes me wonder how powerful Swan's tech presence actually is, because it's very strange that such a prominent figure in a celebrity influencer's life is now, you know, big stories about her are actually now buried.
And I've got two, you know, sort of preliminary takeaways, which is that, you know, Psychology and psychotherapy as disciplines have a lot of repair work to do following the satanic panic era and I'm really glad that we have Hala and Kyra on a little bit later to discuss how they're dealing with that because history repeats.
With terrible therapeutic interventions.
You know, we have to remember that this whole thing in the 80s was kicked off by Lawrence Pazder, who's the Victorian psychoanalyst who helped his client Michelle invent a completely false story about satanic ritual abuse, which was memorialized in a book called Michelle Remembers, which he and she wrote together.
And, you know, I also think that, you know, if this is deep in Swan's background, that there might have been a sense of validation that came through Snow's credentials and her sizable influence in this movement.
And the influence on people's internal lives and personal histories that Swan has now, however, is of a magnitude that Snow couldn't have dreamed of.
It used to be that, you know, pseudotherapists like Snow had to work really hard to spread these macabre fantasies.
They had to write books.
They had to get themselves into news articles.
They had to tour, go to conferences.
They had to brief law enforcement.
They had to do that all in real life.
It's a lot of legwork.
And if Teal Swan wants to do anything approaching this kind of intrusive suggestion of what may be traumatizing everybody in the world, you know, she has YouTube to wave all of those barriers away.
Yeah, and so just to bring that back around, this is the therapist who we've been talking about for the last few minutes, Barbara Snow, who Teal Swan saw in her early 20s.
Right.
And, you know, we have reason to believe that this is sort of the impetus of her origin story and now the approach to quote-unquote therapy that she has developed called the completion process.
My journey began very young, at a very young age.
The first 18 years of my life I was a... This is harder than I thought.
The first 18 years of my life I survived systemic rape and torture which led to experiencing multiple near-death experiences.
To date, I've been able to count at least 13 that occurred before the age of 16 years old.
And in those near-death experiences, I was brought into the light.
We return to the light from which we come.
And I was given teachings and instructions from wonderful beings of light and love.
That prepared me for my life mission.
Okay, so our next trauma queen is called Kaya Ra.
She's much newer to the scene with only 15,000 followers on Facebook and 17,000 on Instagram.
But her digital marketing game, which kind of belies that very soft and kind of shy voice that you may have been hearing, Is next level.
Her website is a polished and frictionless branding and sales machine.
It's organized around brilliant merchandising of her image and personal mythology via a book called The Sophia Code, which is described as a divine movement of feminine empowerment sweeping the planet.
On the website, there are recorded key code initiations and higher self-activations for sale singly or bundled.
And then there's the collection of jewelry that matches the key code initiation.
So when I say brilliant marketing and branding, I really mean it.
Can we define key code initiation?
No.
Is it like cryptocurrency key codes that you have?
The best I can tell is it's a recorded sort of mantra or channeled intonation that she's doing to help you to resonate with whichever of the different frequencies you're wanting to bring into your life, right?
And they're all sort of named after different deities and claim to have different types of positive effects.
Are they diagnosed and then prescribed?
Is there a key code selector?
No, self-selected.
It really seems like Kaya Ra has a more millennial approach in her web design aesthetic, whereas Teal is closer to Gen X, closer to Maya era.
Totally.
Just looking at them, very clean lines on Kaia, and that's appealing towards a younger demographic, perhaps.
So even though the numbers are heavily skewed towards teal, I can see Kaia getting a lot more traction as the years progress.
Yeah, I see teal as having sort of cobbled something together ad hoc over time, whereas kaira emerges as the finished product.
Like, here's the book, here are the key code things, here's the jewelry, here's the whole product.
So let's go on with this.
The jewelry also matches the key code initiation.
So you can buy, conveniently, the piece of jewelry with the inscription on it that's infused with the ascension codes.
It runs anywhere from $111 to over $1,500 per piece of jewelry.
They're each described as having been charged with various codes, and each claims to be therapeutic in some specific way, right?
And so they say things like clearing suicidal thoughts, or lifting traumatic imprints, clearing patriarchal religious programming, or regulating emotional swings.
So buy the jewelry, wear the jewelry, and it's the cure for what ails ya.
Does Soma Vedic make history?
They gotta be in there somewhere.
Then come the Mystery School courses.
Stargate 1 is $444, so they all have these numerologically kind of auspicious prices.
Stargate 2 is $777.
Then there's the Psychic Development Training, which is the same price.
And the Spiritual Mentorship Program is $1333.
A couple of other packages had no listed price.
You can only imagine that means they're quite expensive, but there is a button for you to speak to a team angel if you want to find out more.
Now I can hear some people saying, so what?
She's running a business.
She's offering your standard spiritual coaching style of courses and merchandising like anyone trained in this marketing model would, and that's correct.
But here's where this kind of stuff gets super sticky for me.
Just like Thiel, this newer aspiring spiritual superstar has a goddamn awful origin story closely woven together with her claims of paranormal abilities and otherworldly identity.
And this is incidentally also where I part company with the who are we to say forced non-judgment that many feel the need to extend to anything that sounds sort of spiritual, right?
Why?
Because the hyper traumatized paranormal origin story is the spiritual influencer version of having a PhD.
It deliberately creates the beyond-heroic-survivor-divinely-ordained-authority halo effect, and it's also a kind of trauma bonding with people who have this story inflicted upon them.
Kyra claims in a YouTube video to have grown up in a military-based satanic sex trafficking ring, in which she was subjected to rape and torture, watched countless other children be killed, and apparently died herself, as we heard, multiple times, surviving only by the grace of the Ascended Masters and the Angelic Beings who saved her, which one is then left to perhaps wonder, why didn't they intervene any sooner?
You know, I'm kind of mind blown by it's also a kind of trauma bonding with those people that she inflicts the story upon.
I didn't resonate with the fact that part of what's happening with these disclosures and confessions is that she becomes somebody that the follower has to take care of.
And part of taking care of Teal Swan or Kyra, even though they evince this kind of invulnerability because they've transcended this horrible story, is that you couldn't possibly question where they're coming from, right?
I mean, not only is there the sort of general sort of cultural law around we have to believe what you're saying about what happened, but also because you're saying what you're saying, I have to do what I can as a follower to help you continue in your process of projecting this invulnerability.
I hadn't really clued into that, that the followers become caregivers that way.
Yeah.
Because if they were to turn away, if they were to turn away and to say, you know, I don't actually resonate with that.
It would be a stunning sort of failure of empathy, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
It was like, but don't you care?
Don't you care about what happened to her?
Don't you care what happened to all of these other people who have disclosed what they have to disclose in the company of Kaira, right?
Yeah, and if you don't, that could also be your denial that you're not willing to face the terrible hidden truth about yourself.
It's so layered because she's simultaneously inflicting a story upon you that is traumatizing and that might resonate with whatever you have going on.
And she's being the authority figure who claims to have broken through into some sort of divine revelatory knowledge about reality and about you, right?
And then she's inviting you to project your wounded child onto her and feel protective of her.
What an incredible knot.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in a way, it's almost a logical endpoint of this kind of social media culture of, you know, more authenticity and more vulnerability is the way to connect.
Yeah.
Well, that's the word.
When watching Kaya, like she embodies vulnerability.
She does not have a strong presence when she's talking.
It's very meek compared to Teal, who is just like, she's up there and she's like, this is the truth and you can't even question it.
Whereas Kaia is a completely different take.
And that, like, I was wondering why, because we're so accustomed to more authoritarian figures in the delivery, which Teal has.
And I was wondering why Kaia was getting so much traction with her delivery.
But I think Matthew just kind of framed that very well.
Kaira, in the preface of her book, unpacks her origin story further in ways that echo the dark fantasies of the QAnon tale of elites maintaining power and wealth through satanic rape ceremonies in Masonic temples.
But it turns out, and this is going back to Bea Scofield's excellent reporting, the family and friends who knew her growing up as Colleen Santoro know nothing about any of this, and the brother who shared a room with her for a few years says their childhood was a blast.
B. Schofield also interviewed her sister and uncle, who just can't imagine where she came up with this alternate history.
Her book, The Sophia Code, recounts how one night in Sedona, a visionary experience described in quantum psychedelic detail left Colleen ordained as the leader of something called the Sophia Dragon Tribe, a group of ascended masters who just so happened to have their name under copyright owned by Guyra.
Running entrepreneurial spiritual businesses based on their branded charisma and fantastical origin stories that then coincide with those gruesome traumas supposedly leading to interdimensional supernatural experiences and paranormal abilities.
Through their ordeal, they become superhuman and are recognized cosmically as having a singular divine mission that you can be a part of for a substantial fee.
And here are some quotes from them on the pandemic.
So here's Teal from March 15th of 2020, so early on.
She has a YouTube video with over 400,000 views.
And here's a quote I pulled out.
Fear of COVID-19 is rooted in narcissism.
She asks, do you see the danger of being controlled by someone specifically telling you what to do and what to think for their own self-centered motives?
Governments and many companies have many different motives.
The reaction people have to COVID-19 has the potential to kill so many more people and destroy so many more lives than the, and here she does air quotes, organic virus itself.
Now, Kaia has been a lot more circumspect.
Again, she's clever about her branding or sort of more savvy.
So she doesn't really reference the pandemic directly, though under a recent post from just last month with a striking graphic that explains how your sovereignty is the checkmate to get off the chessboard, she says in a comment, let's be honest, There wouldn't be a full-blown covert global war of annihilation if our collective light wasn't an atomic bomb waiting to go off inside the matrix.
Today I turn to chapter 13 of the Sophia Code, so she opened her own book, for a reminder of how powerful we really are even as the media continues to divide and program millions into submission.
Quick shout out to the guys at Decoding the Guru, since there was a mention of Sedona, which I know they're a big fan of.
On their last episode, they referenced how it's a spiritual vortex, and it just seems like so many of these figures, it's like some part of their origin myth has to happen in Sedona.
That's the pilgrimage, right?
That's their visit to the holy city.
What's really tricky to me about Kyra is, and specifically in relation to the fact that Bea was able to get some interviews, is that the Kafka trap is so easy for her to spring, which is that friends and family members who express disbelief at her childhood account Can be instantly said to be deniers, suppressors, conspirators, right?
And she'll be appealing to a very real phenomenon, not just of hidden institutional abuse but also just human secrecy in general.
But one interesting thing that I pulled out of the Wayback Machine is that at least as late as 2010, Kaya Raw was not referring to any of the ritual abuse backstory in her bio.
So, this leaves questions.
I mean, it could be said that, you know, perhaps she hadn't remembered by that point.
She wasn't ready to disclose.
Those would all be fair.
But I just want to throw that out there.
But the same themes come up in so many of these stories.
Vast childhood Absences, military figures controlling the scenes.
There are Masonic temples in this one.
There was a lot of Mormon stuff in Teal's story.
But as you've started to point out, Julian, there's a real paradox between the depravity of these stories and the meticulous style and verve with which both of them are put together.
It's almost as if I think you described it as the sort of PhD of the trauma influencer.
It's almost as if the more abject the story, the more glorious the recovery.
It feels almost like a charismatic calculus that to hit bottom, to be brought to absolute nothing, to be degraded in the most horrible way, to endure peak humiliation is a prerequisite for elevation, for ascension.
And I think this is often true of cult leaders.
It was definitely true of the two guys that I was with.
And I wanted to point out that Len Oaks, who did the sort of one of the only sociological studies of cult leaders by interviewing A couple dozen of them actually in a book called Prophetic Charisma from the 90s.
He describes a five-part pattern that we can also see operating here which is that there's this sense of early life being sublime and blessed and you know the person knew that they were enveloped in light and they knew that they came from another place and then there's An incubation period filled with trials and trauma and austere study.
And then there's some kind of awakening to what later comes as a mission.
And then as he describes, each one of them goes through some kind of fall from grace.
But in general, this flip back and forth between this is how devastating my life is and this is how much heaven I can offer you.
The whole scene is like really bipolar, right?
Like grace comes through disgrace.
That, you know, you break down to break through.
And so, I'm really glad, like I listened to your interview with Hala and Kyra, that they emphasize the slowness of real recovery, the imperfection of real recovery, that there's no silver bullets ever to resolving childhood adverse experiences and trauma.
And I just, you know, think that the wellness world in general is very vulnerable to this bipolar, both promise and threat.
That's very black and white.
It's almost like custom made for this, you're in or you're out.
You're going to live or die.
And this is the sociality that you're going to live with in cults.
You have to be all in or else you are in the outer dark.
Look, I want to be clear about what I think we do and don't know.
We don't know what happened to the girls formerly known as Mary and Colleen.
They may have very real painful traumas.
They may have experienced some kind of mental health crisis or have as yet undiagnosed psychological disorders.
We don't know.
We know in both cases that there's no corroborating evidence for any of the bizarre ritual abuse origin stories, as was the case during the Satanic Panic period, to which this harkens back.
We don't know if the placebo effect of Thiel's magical paintings or Kaya's Ascension Code-infused jewelry has provided some solace and hope for someone who then, later, went on to seek real therapy.
That has probably happened.
But as pearl-clutchingly controversial as this will be to say, for reasons I may never fully understand, We know that these women are not aliens, they're not in contact with interdimensional beings, they don't have any paranormal abilities.
We also know that they are each training others to make similarly authoritative claims about how to heal trauma and awaken spiritually, and so that cycle continues.
And I want to just mention here, by way of closing, for anyone interested, there's a brilliant book from 1996 by Donald Coleshed.
We'll link to it in the show notes, titled The Inner World of Trauma, Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit.
Kahlshed is a Jungian who uses myths, fairy tales, object relations theory, and about 20 years of case histories to explore the relationships between unbearable trauma and psychiatric delusions.
Whether or not Teal and Kaia are sincere in their origin stories, I would argue that at the very least, they're potentially leading those captivated by their charisma in the opposite direction of healing and living in the real world.
I just want to come back for a moment to what I'm describing as this bipolar calculus at play in the charisma that Swan and Ra shine brightest in relation to how low in Dante's hell they've journeyed.
But I also think it's worth bringing up the mechanism with which this is revealed, which is confession.
That clip we played of Kaira really nailed it down, and I want to listen to just the first few seconds of it again.
My journey began very young, at a very young age.
The first 18 years of my life, I was a... This is harder than I thought.
Okay, so you hear that pause.
That's the pause of confession and disclosure, and I think that's as much a part of the induction into her group as her actual story is.
I don't think it's just the story that's important, but it's the trial of speaking it aloud in a ritual format.
So Kaira confesses and reveals and discloses, and she has to do it over and over again.
And that pause signals that a secret is on the threshold of being revealed, and I would say that she's successful as a leader to the extent that she sells the moment of revelation.
The problem is, is that a secret can only really be disclosed once.
And so it makes sense that more secrets have to emerge.
And in Kaya Raw's case, we know that the details escalate.
And here's where I'll just point back to that advert from 2010 where her bio doesn't say anything about her SRA past.
As I said, maybe she wasn't ready to disclose it, maybe she hadn't remembered it.
We don't have to insinuate that she made it up in order to track the escalation, however, because once you confess something and the confession wins you followers, where would it stop?
Like, why wouldn't you keep confessing or digging deeper?
And why wouldn't confession then become a kind of labor?
And wouldn't those following you also need to confess in order to gain social status?
And all of this takes me back to some of what Michel Foucault says about confession in The History of Sexuality in the first volume.
And I can't say that I understand Foucault or even really like him.
I don't really think anybody understands him.
Or likes him.
Or like Sam, I also want to say that there's a recent article interviewing Guy Sormon, and we now know for sure that Foucault knew all about the power and domination he wrote about firsthand as an abuser of boys.
So citing him, to me, I'm feeling ambivalent.
It's feeling more and more like citing Hannibal Lecter on diet or something like that.
But anyway, here he is.
He says, We have singularly become a confessing society.
The confession has spread its effects far and wide.
It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships.
In the most ordinary affairs of everyday life and in the most solemn rites, one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles.
One goes about telling with the greatest precision whatever is most difficult to tell.
One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves.
One admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about.
When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat.
Western man has become a confessing animal.
Our society has become obsessed with the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage.
Now Foucault died of HIV AIDS in 1984, but I doubt that he would have been surprised by the ruthless acceleration of confession, which now appears as gig work, something to be monetized, especially in a post-industrial influence economy in which people are reduced to buying and selling their internal lives to each other, whether they're real or fantastical.
So I think that what haunts me most about Swan and Raw is that they are products of and facilitators of a zone in which confession and disclosure operates in an anti-therapeutic way.
Like there might be an impulse to disclose the inner self out of a yearning for healing and for community, but in the landscape that those desires are commodified in, And the inner life, with all of its scintillating shame, it becomes the currency of influence.
In recent years, the term trauma has emerged from the shadows and become a spiritual influencer buzzword.
Figures like Teal Swan and Kaya Ra use fantastical hypertraumatic origin stories to establish their wounded healer credibility.
Their polished online presence markets directly to vulnerable people seeking healing from their trauma, which Thiel and Kaya promise to deliver via downloadable magic paintings, ascension code-infused jewelry, and off-label, self-trained therapy techniques.
I reached out to two friends and colleagues of mine who I've known from teaching yoga on LA's West Side for the last 25 plus years to get their perspective on how trauma is handled in spiritual communities.
Hala Curry and Kira Hagland are therapists and yoga teachers who lead trauma-informed yoga teacher trainings.
They draw on their psychological education and clinical experience, as well as the somatic experiencing work of Peter Levine, which focuses on negotiating the physiological symptoms of trauma through sensation awareness.
We talked about predatory cults, how protective they feel toward people seeking healing, autonomic nervous system regulation, and the gradual, unglamorous process of doing the real work.
I also asked their advice on what seekers might look for in trustworthy guides and what should make them walk or even run in the opposite direction.
Here's my interview with them.
So, Kira and Hala, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Welcome to the Conspirituality Podcast.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, it's glad to be here.
Absolutely.
I mean, we go back so such a long time together with so many shared interests.
It's really cool to get to do this in this particular context.
Yeah, it's been so long.
Both of you train teachers in something called trauma-informed yoga.
So I'd love to hear and I'm sure some of our listeners would be interested in finding out more about what that is and why yoga teachers and their students might benefit from the trauma-informed perspective and tools.
Hala, since you are the creator of this officially, I'm going to let you step in and introduce it, if that's okay.
So, why is trauma-informed yoga a thing?
Why is it important?
Well, why might students and teachers benefit from this perspective and these tools?
I think it's a really important perspective because I think a lot of people come to yoga Because they have trauma.
They may or may not perceive themselves as trauma survivors, but whether it's a big trauma or a little trauma, we come, many times people come to yoga to address anxiety, depression, you know, mental health issues.
So for a student to know about it is important because then a student might be able to discern what type of a class or what type of a teacher creates the safety for them to safely Be with themselves and do some healing work.
For teachers, I think it's an absolute responsibility and a necessary skill set and body of information to have in order to hold space responsibly for our students.
Sometimes trauma symptoms don't obviously look like trauma symptoms.
A student might feel overwhelmed.
They might even be defiant.
And a trauma-informed perspective really asks a teacher to think about the mental health, the emotional well-being of their student and how they're holding space.
And so if we don't have that perspective, we can do a lot of harm.
So it sounds like you're saying the trauma is there anyway, whether we're acknowledging it or not as students or as space holders, right?
Whatever the modality is that it sounds like you're saying trauma is a fairly Widespread or common experience that people have?
I mean, I think statistically speaking, trauma is very common.
And, you know, after 2020, there's, you know, sort of a global collective trauma.
Nobody was spared, even though people are impacted differently, especially today, post-COVID, amidst COVID.
We're not post-COVID yet.
People are overwhelmed.
Yeah, and I'd love to ask you, Kira, what brought you to want to train teachers in this way?
And I would imagine before that, in your own teaching and your own practice, like how did this unfold for you?
I found yoga to be incredibly healing for me in my own process, you know, coming to it both with eating disorders, with so much stuff that I didn't quite understand at the time.
And it was very organizing in a physical sense as the way I think it has been taught from like the Western yoga industrial complex, if you will.
I also was in Ashtanga for a while.
And so that was, I think there was something about the set, the repetition, the movement of energy and the strength and stability from inside out that was really supportive for me.
But I got to a point where there was still so many patterns for me continuing on the map.
And so when I started realizing, or taking a slightly different approach that had more of a trauma informed lens that I think started before the somatic experiencing training and before, you know, Hollow was able to kind of put a name to it for me.
It actually started with some of my teachers that I worked with in India as well that just created more sense of safety and just there's more compassion that was involved in it.
There was a sense of it wasn't just about physical mastery of anything.
It was also like an emotional sense of groundedness and centeredness that that was like, hold it, this is what I've been looking for.
Here's the key to what's underneath and to feeling like I could exist within myself rather than having to just kind of twist myself into a pretzel for everyone else.
So, when I started experiencing that as well and then I did the somatic experiencing training a while ago that just changed my lens on how I was operating in the world and how nervous system state is really dictating so much of the story that I was connecting myself to, the story that I was understanding about the world around me.
Sometimes even like how, you know, I perceive the universe or what that is, you know, was really going on from my inner biological state.
And so when that was happening, and I was seeing just little shifts and changes and how I was working with people in the room and how transformative I mean, these practices can be.
And if you add in this containment that looks at the psychological and the emotional well-being of people as well as the physical, then like there's, and also trusting in the organic intelligence that's within a person, like the healing capacity, when there's a sense, when it can detect safety and well-being, that there's a lot of change and healing that occurs there, right?
It becomes more, more of a dialogue rather than a top-down approach.
So all of that was super interesting to me.
Yeah, I feel like, as beautifully said, I feel like the somatic experiencing piece is so relevant to this conversation just in terms of a model that emerged around
A really physiological, like a neurobiological understanding of what's going on with our bodies in terms of perhaps unresolved overwhelming experience and how to then hold space for that or give tools for that as well as be able to see the signs in the room when you're working with people, yeah?
Yeah, I mean I know for myself the concept of trauma and emotional healing that I came up with kind of through the 90s working with Anna Forrest who was a teacher who was very interested in this kind of integration was much more of the
A more kind of mystified, super experiential, really cathartic notion of like, the body holds your trauma and you've got to get into these very intense poses and make a lot of noise and release the trauma, you know, like get into that big cathartic discharge.
And for me, somatic experiencing was this sort of radical 180 shift on that of like, oh wait, slow down, get subtle, track things in a very sort of Yeah, it's very titrated, right?
And in SE, we're often told that slow is fast, right?
That the slower we go in, the smaller pieces of work we can do, the more that that has a ripple effect.
And I think that can be really useful.
I think sometimes people need that cathartic energy as well.
I think both can be useful when done responsibly.
But for sure, what I love, I particularly love about SE is that it's very integrating, right?
It also helps understand that for some survivors, moving too fast can be disorienting or fragmenting.
And so how do we read when we need to slow down and integrate and integrate versus when pushing is appropriate?
And I, you know, I know from your history and some of the other modalities that sometimes that pushing can be re-traumatizing for some folks.
Not your history, but like the modality that, you know, you experienced.
And it can be if we're not doing the integration piece, it can cause more fragmentation so that regardless of the modality and understanding from the person holding space of like, when is the system actually reorganizing at another level of stability?
Are we keeping the system disorganized?
Yeah, and the thing that always comes to mind for me is really being embodied, like really being at home and attuned to sort of the feedback loops within your own neurobiology.
It's like this scientific piece came along to validate an experiential model that was already unfolding.
But, but I do think in the history of somatic psychology, it was, it was much more, uh, much more cathartic in the past.
And I still value that as well.
But, but yeah, this somatic experiencing piece has, has been huge for me too.
I'm curious what, what you think about all of this, because we're already in this territory, right?
Where we're, we're talking about yoga, uh, and, and being a facilitator within a yogic space, whatever, whatever form that might take from this psychologically informed point of view, how, How do you think about the relationships and maybe the boundaries or the delineations, right, the places where it doesn't overlap between practices like mindfulness or embodied awareness, yoga practice, you know, other things like that, and therapy?
So much of this is nuanced, right?
And even going back to like nervous system and like being able to like, what I love about SD and or just like the emergence of somatics in general is that it's also a recognition that we are all holding such individual needs and experiences.
Right?
And your genetic input is going to present in a certain way and have certain needs.
And it's not only trauma, right?
It's like, were we born with neurodivergence in a different way?
What does our DNA hold?
And it's the same thing, I think, with therapy, right?
It's such a nuanced conversation because when I was doing my training in clinical psychology or clinical social work, All of a sudden, mindfulness became very, very popular.
It had been for years, of course, but it became very popular where people who had never, you know, even heard of it before were opening books and leading others in it.
So, it's complicated, right?
I think that having mindfulness and having the psychoeducation around the mindfulness of how to track within the body within a therapeutic session, I think is so valuable.
Being able to realize that like we are not just these head brains but a heart and these gut brains and that they all work together and having a map to like figure out what they're all communicating is so very vital.
And I think that the person who is holding that space of facilitator or guide or therapist I think needs to have their own personal experience in it.
And then I'm also seeing all of this overlay of bringing more psychology into the yoga room, which is beautiful.
It's so beautiful that people are having things named for them that they've never had before and having these emotional and psychological awakenings.
And at the same time, that can be complicated, especially if somebody doesn't have a larger framework.
I knew after I went through somatic experiencing, I'm like, this is a part of it, but it's not all of it.
If I'm going to facilitate this, Like, with some ethics, I need to go and learn more.
Does that mean Western psychology has all of the answers?
Fuck no.
But it does mean, sorry, I shouldn't swear.
You should, you really should.
It's okay, I'm a podcaster.
If you feel that strongly about it, I believe that you should.
I do, I do, I very much do.
But it has some of the answers, and I feel like that that's the, being able to have a more nuanced, integrated approach to healing, facilitating healing, is essential in order to be ethical.
It was beautiful and succinct.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hala, any thoughts about that?
I mean, I think that yoga teachers, whether they want to or not, end up being people's therapist, life coach, pastor, nutritionist, right?
That because yoga is so moving, you and I spent a lot of time talking about this, Julian, right?
That people might walk in saying, thinking, I'm just going to teach this one thing.
And then students start to feel this sense of trust potentially and invest in that teacher so much.
So whether they want to or not, I think that when we hold space for people to be in their bodies, their psychological material emerges.
And so having that awareness, just like Kira said, is really vital.
It's to just acknowledge.
When I first started teaching, I didn't want to acknowledge that.
And I was like, I'm just like my students.
I just happen to be standing on this part of the room.
And the teachers were like, no, no, no.
Like, this is a responsibility.
Yeah, it's a big responsibility.
To that, and this is something that you two, I think, were bringing in a long time ago, about just having circles in space for reflection, right, and for accountability, and looking at, like, at least in psychological terms, the transference and the counter-transference that comes up.
Because as Hala was saying, like, there is going to be projection and space-holding, whether somebody wants it or not.
And that has not, I think, typically been a part of the yoga teacher training, for instance.
And so being able to have spaces of that, I think, is so incredibly essential.
Yeah I agree and I feel like it's a there's a there's a little bit of a conundrum that I that I almost feel like we've been wrestling with for some years here right which is like on the one hand you could do the thing that I think a lot of teachers used to do, which is just ignore it, right?
It's not part of what we're doing here.
We're focused on this asana practice, or we're focused on these particular philosophical beliefs, and that's all we do.
You have the tools, go ahead, and I'm just here leading the class.
And then on the other hand, you have, okay, we're going to start to bring this stuff up and name it and create permission and normalize it and say, hey, yeah, actually, there may be times where you get in touch with emotions, or there may be times when certain past traumatic episodes come up, or there may be dynamics or there may be times when certain past traumatic episodes come up, or there may be dynamics that go
Being able to name that and be aware of it seems to acknowledge a dimension that's there anyway, but then it's like, well, hold on.
Is the teacher really the therapist for the 50 people in the room or the 10 people in the room or the private session?
Are they the therapist?
Well, no, not really, right?
And it's sort of acknowledging that there are all of these overlaps and yet there have to be delineations in order for things to work.
Absolutely.
be as healthy as we can make them.
So what do you think about that?
I mean, I always feel like an important piece of the discussion might be having therapists that you refer out to if you're a facilitator of any kind, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that understanding your scope of practice, even if you are a clinician, but you're in the role of a yoga teacher, you know, it can be very confusing to blur those boundaries with a student.
So I think that you're naming an interesting dilemma, which is once a teacher feels confident enough to name these dynamics, students might feel more comfortable to then touch into those dynamics and then bring it And having a really great list of resources is vital, and it's a healthy way to set a boundary to say, I'm so glad you trusted me with this material.
This is not the right container for it, or I don't have the right training for this, or you deserve some So more support here are some options.
I think also, even before that, as well as just looking at that person's, I don't know, ego, because it can, I think that this happens where there's an overstep in the scope of practice because somebody, you know, like very well-meaning people who often have that more kind of fond response in their background, right, of the trauma response of wanting to be people pleasers,
And very much a recovering one of those, you know, like I can identify with this of wanting to step in and feeling like either they want to solve and fix everyone or they want to, or they feel like they have to be there for what the person is asking, regardless if they're able to.
And I think that that is often goes really unchecked because this is, you know, in any healing profession, right?
Like we're, we're coming from, from what we've learned often.
And that unpacking of our own material, I think it'd be, Yeah, I mean I would imagine, and Hala, you and I used to talk about this in the past, there's a kind of self-selecting propensity for yoga teachers to be people pleasers, right?
Or to be people who are seeking the limelight, seeking that validation and that importance.
It's a tricky archetype that we're perhaps navigating.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of the things that I've noticed is as this conversation has gone from being really niche, right?
Like, Hala, when you and I were talking about this maybe like 12 years ago, 15 years ago, it was kind of an unusual thing, right?
And it's wonderful, I think, that it's become more and more I wonder if you see any problematic aspects to it in terms of like trauma buzzwords, the concept of trauma, ideas about how one can heal trauma through yoga or meditation or what have you, different types of maybe more esoteric practices.
Is there a way that you've seen things maybe become distorted or oversimplified or being presented in a way that is maybe not entirely realistic or responsible?
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I've seen sort of the innocence of somebody who does like a weekend training and then like calls themselves a trauma-informed whatever, right?
And then feels like they have this Global understanding, right?
Or somebody who's a survivor themselves and thinks that that makes them an expert in other people's traumas, which is tricky, right?
Because everybody's experience is different, right?
So surviving and however you coped, whatever got you through may not be useful for other people.
And so Especially as trauma, trauma informed, the language is becoming more normalized in the culture and the information.
Like there's so many workshops and you know, this is why, you know, in the training that we develop, we will not certify anybody until they've gotten supervision from us.
So we've had dozens of hours of interaction with them because we can't know how the information is landing and how they're translating it and say, You are now.
You can go do this thing, right?
So when people take in the information and then without like so much of clinical training is hundreds of hours of supervision, you know, sitting with somebody who's holding you accountable, who's an elder.
And, and again, I think that, you know, to Kira's point, we don't just have to be sort of in the mental health Western paradigm, right?
Even people that are learning other healing practices will sit with elders, will sit with people, Who have a lot of experience, you know, what, you know, I often say what, what distinguishes somebody from, from being sort of a lay person and a professional, and I use professional in a broad sense, right?
Is, is experience.
Like I, you know, I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of people with trauma.
So I learned from all those experiences.
I don't just have my own experience, but I've had to learn, um, and through the accountability practices.
So I, I have concern, um, For the way that harm can be done either unintentionally, most people are unintentional, and then also intentionally.
The way that especially survivors that have a lot of unmetabolized trauma are extra vulnerable.
And I feel very protective of them.
I do think that there's been a lot of oversimplification, right?
And again, this is a nuanced conversation because I'm so glad that it's now in the mainstream.
You know, I'm glad that the Veterans Administration are thinking about, you know, are bringing in trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness practices as well.
And if you do not understand the workings of the autonomic nervous system and that generally like through the polyvagal framework, I think,
There can be a lot of damage done right like just telling somebody that they should go to a Vipassana when there's and they just really need to quiet their mind or even just the idea of like you have to just take a slow deep breath if somebody's having a panic attack like that's that is not helpful that can be very harmful and there's a lot of like and it doesn't mean that taking deeper breaths or pranayama practices is bad it's just it's such an individual Prescription, right?
Just like a medical doctor isn't gonna give you, Julian, the same prescription for you or whatever is mine.
And it's, I think really as Hala was saying, like being able to sit and know that.
And I also think that there's, um, I don't want to say a diluting of the word trauma, but you know, just of all of us, we're humans.
Trauma is a human thing and we're all going to experience that, but we're not all going to be traumatized.
And Hala speaks so beautifully to like resilient, resilience in people and how like our resilience is a natural aspect and dysregulation happens.
Right.
And there's a difference between dysregulation, And that present as certain symptoms as heightened anxiety, which might be because of an experience or multiple like relational experiences.
And it might be your genetic coding, right?
Like it might be how you were born.
You know, that could be historical trauma related, but it also may not be.
And just being able to like, not everything is a trauma and being able to acknowledge like dysregulation is its own thing and valuable to work within its own right.
Right, but I often think that and I have to think through this more.
I was having a conversation with Carrie Kelly last week or so and another colleague of ours and she mentioned something that's really interesting to me is like the idea of the use of trauma as like spiritual bypass in it and in itself.
And so that would be a conversation that, you know, like I haven't fleshed out my ideas of that yet.
It's fascinating.
I mean, I know that that 10, 15 years ago, I would have conversations with people who were involved in yoga or who less so with meditation because meditation and Jack Kornfield had kind of been, you know, going into that territory of the integration of say mindfulness and psychology.
But a lot of times people would go, I don't know what you're talking about.
Like, what do you mean?
What do you mean someone's on the yoga mat and then they start to have emotions or they remember something from their past?
Like, why would that happen in Trikonasana?
I don't get it, right?
And now I feel like especially with younger yoga teachers and spiritual people, I find if I even mention the word trauma, they're like, oh, yeah.
Yeah, no, yoga is really good for trauma.
Yeah, you can work through your trauma on the yoga mat.
I'm like, but, but how?
Like, well, oh no, I, you know, I did this thing or I learned how to do this tapping technique and now I don't have any more, any more trauma.
You should do it too.
Yes, I'm obviously clearly moved by this.
Because it might work for some people, but it doesn't for everyone.
And not everybody, this may be a total tangent here, but not everybody has trauma in their hips.
Or if their hips are tight, it's not necessarily because they were abused.
It may be.
And it may just be because, like, you know, their femur inserts in their acetabulum in a different way.
Well, but if they could just work through that trauma, then they could get their leg behind their head, right?
Their hips would release.
Yeah, so these are some of the examples of the ways that I think it kind of goes awry.
And so this brings me to the types of charismatic influencers that we will have talked about on the podcast already by the time people are hearing this.
Specifically, we're looking at these two women, Kaya Ra and Teal Swan.
And there are many others who are similar, but people keep sending us their stuff and saying, Hey, what do you think about this?
I know that obviously, you know, you can't diagnose specifically what's going on here.
None of us is there firsthand.
We are drawing on, and I shared these articles with you, the work of Bea Schofield.
And she does, I think, very, very deep and responsible investigative journalism.
For both of these articles, interviewed a lot from people who've been close to the two women that we're talking about.
The thing I wonder about, and I'd love to ask you to comment on if you can, is this phenomenon where these quite young and unqualified people very quickly gain big followings on social media that run into the hundreds of thousands.
And with Teal, she has over a million, I think a million two on Facebook, right?
By claiming a very intense origin story, so talk about eliciting transference, right?
Very intense origin story, some kind of paranormal ability, And promoting themselves as having access to esoteric knowledge, the ability to heal you, and it tends to draw in a lot of followers who are seeking relief from suffering, very often quite profound trauma.
And the influencers are then using this word trauma in terms of what they can help with and what their mission is on the planet, basically.
A lot of it, to me, is very grandiose.
When you see someone like Kaya Ra, who claims an elaborate and horrific origin story, says she was ordained by God to rule over a tribe of dragons.
She's selling quite expensive jewelry that she claims can heal trauma or prevent suicide.
Or someone like Teal Swan, who has an even more gruesome backstory that seems to be part of this pattern, says she's an alien with x-ray vision.
She's told followers who tattoo themselves with her symbol that's suicide.
So that's how loyal they are to her, right?
And then she says, suicide can be a valid reset button.
You know, no problem.
How do you react to this when you come across this kind of stuff?
I mean, look, my first reaction is is very protective of people.
I mean, I think I have two reactions.
A, you know, I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
You know that about me, Julian, even if I have to, like, really do a lot of mental gymnastics, because I think it's important to try that first.
Right.
And so, you know, I know I know survivors who are not ready to do the real work and they just need to buy the crystal and hold it in their hands and say the thing and believe that's going to help them.
And I would never want to take that away because they're not ready.
They just need the placebo.
They need the person who just says, say these three things or buy this necklace, right?
So there's on some level, I'm open to things that don't work as long as they don't do harm, right?
As long as there's no harm, but you know, so I don't care.
Like if it's not expensive and somebody's gonna buy a thing or do a thing and they think it's helping them and that's what they're ready for, like I signed up for those things.
Like I was like, I'm going to sign up for the workshop because you're telling me if I do these two things, I'm going to feel better.
Done, right?
The problem is, is what happens after that?
Like, are people being roped in to spend more money?
And then from what you're saying, like taken to this point of really being exploited, right?
That that level of exploitation is what is really scary, right?
So I think there's a fine line.
I don't mind sort of the hokey people who like sell one thing or do one thing.
And it's like, it's something somebody can hold on to until, you know, I had to do that before I did the real work, right?
I, you know, a bunch of, you know, I was holding on to amethyst being like, this will get me out of my body.
Cool.
Let's get out of our bodies.
Right.
Um, you know, unfortunately, and I think, I think a lot of these folks, again, genuinely think they're helping people.
Right.
Um, and because their own trauma is unresolved, it's very validating to get at the mirroring that what I'm saying is true.
And again, it's a big bypass for them.
And so I get very protective of survivors who can get roped into that and especially the danger of I mean, look, I think that like reflecting to a survivor that like sometimes suicide feels like the only option is OK, but to actually indicate like, I'm going to support this is what it sounds like you were saying.
It's very irresponsible and very dangerous.
So I always try to look at at what point can something be sort of silly from the outside.
But if it's if it's working people and it's getting them through the day to day, OK, you know.
Um, you know, I remember when I walked into an unnamed person yoga class that was like very loud hip hop music, very dangerous sequencing.
And the teacher just said, this is all this group can tolerate right now.
Like they would never take a class that would actually get them in their bodies.
They're coming because there's like, you know, this whole other thing happening.
And that was a doorway that got them somewhere else.
So the problem is if you go in the doorway and then the door gets closed and you're trapped, Then it's very irresponsible, which sounds like is what's happening in these dynamics.
Hala, that was so well said.
And it just, yeah, the protective piece, like that's what comes up for me as well.
You know, I, somewhat similarly, like I, I am very open to what other people experience, you know, that It is not for me to tell anyone else where they believe they've come from, what their experiences that they've had.
I don't want to invalidate that.
I can't know anybody.
I can't be in anybody else's bodies.
And I don't think, as Hala mentioned, one should ever take away the tools or the resources or the narratives people have.
And I certainly wouldn't ever want to create a sense of shame around that.
But I do get really concerned I don't think healing trauma should cost a lot of money, necessarily, or put somebody I say that and I'm a therapist who charges money.
So, and also I spent like thousands of dollars on my own, my own therapy.
So it's like, I don't mean to say that, but I'm thinking more of like the pyramid schemes or you get in and it's like, well, if you really want to heal, then you need to go to the next level.
Like it just shouldn't be, um, uh, per what is the word?
Um, Exploitative?
Exploitative is definitely a word.
There's a P word that I'm thinking of that's not coming out.
Predatory?
What was that?
Predatory.
Predatory, thank you.
It shouldn't be predatory and sometimes I feel like that's what this is.
It also, I don't think, should reinforce like abusive trauma patterns.
You know, and what I see, and again, I am not as familiar with the folks that you're talking about.
So this isn't a commentary on them, but what I have seen with other cult survivors that I've worked with is very much like these very charismatic figures.
That are holding more of like an alpha state and I don't know if that was because of like pathology or or you know physical dominance whatever's going on in their bodies, but often reinforcing those abusive patterns of shaming or of Harming in then a lot of like love love loving on someone so going through that whole abuse pattern and I feel like for many folks that are getting involved with
These more complicated, charismatic figures, there is an aspect of fond response that comes up.
And that is so easily preyed upon in relationships.
You know, whether the person, whether that figure means to or not, like it's like people's psyches are delicate and, and we have to take care of them to make sure that like there's not more harm being done.
Yeah.
I mean, what you said about the pyramids, I mean, everything you said I thought was really good.
Thank you.
The, the pyramid scheme thing sort of jumped out at me as well.
You know, where if you're, I feel like what happens with, with cultish situations or, or a pyramid scheme, MLM kind of situations is that, Even if promises are being made about healing your trauma, the tools and the perspectives and the experiences that you're buying, they may work to some extent, but ultimately they're not really based in the facilitators having the right training.
They're not based in science and psychology and models that have the kind of mentorship and responsibility and ethics and legality that you've both been touching on.
And so then when it doesn't really work, that's actually the perfect hook.
Well, you didn't try hard enough.
You didn't believe deeply enough.
And actually now, if you buy the Platinum Bracelet that has the special codes that I downloaded from the secret source that will really get past your resistance, this time it's gonna work.
And it feels like that's part of how the whole thing gets looped.
And then when you're dealing with someone like Teal Swan, where students have committed suicide, Based on her suggestion that that might be okay.
Very disturbing.
I would wonder from both of you, what you might say, let's say you came across someone who was freshly, or maybe someone who's listening, right?
They're freshly delving into spirituality as an alternative way or a complimentary way, right?
And I think we can all relate to this, to find trauma healing, to find personal growth or balance in their lives.
What would you say to them in terms of red flags to avoid, and on the other side of the coin, the good signs that might indicate that these situations or guides are trustworthy?
You know, I think the first thing is anybody who promises a quick fix, that's like your first red flag.
None of this is quick.
Second, anybody like you want to ask people like who's holding you accountable?
What is your accountability practice?
Are you in your own therapy?
Are you working with mentors?
Are you getting supervision?
What's your accountability?
Um, And I mean, those are the two big ones, you know, and I think what's tough, especially for survivors, they might not have the embodied intuition of like, Ooh, this person feels like it's going to feel good.
Like, because you're going to be told what you want, right?
So that, that tricky part of also saying sometimes what feels right is us getting hooked into our trauma.
So how are we discerning?
Is this person holding appropriate boundaries and are they making lavish claims?
Your healing is slow.
It's not glamorous.
It doesn't happen overnight.
And is that person indicating an integration?
And so, you know, I think those are the red flags.
And then there's the signs of something good is that feeling of like, you know, is this person showing empathy?
How are they dealing with people for whom their technique doesn't work?
I mean, one of the biggest things that Kira and I, when we're training yoga teachers, we're training them to say, never tell a student this will do that.
This may do that, and if it doesn't, here's other things to try.
And that ultimately, we want you to be empowered to figure out what works for you, right?
That that's healing traumas, that sense of empowerment in our own selves, not handing our power over to somebody else.
So those are my first thoughts.
All of that.
Like, all of that.
And then, You know, I would also say like the right to say no, if that's not built into a practice, you know, or spirituality, then I would be very concerned about that.
Also, as Hala mentioned, trauma healing is hard and it's messy.
Whether you're doing EMDR work, which I work with, there's always a disclaimer.
This is hard and stuff is going to come up, but we need to slow down if that's the case.
We need to process it if it's the case.
Claims of it being easy or Just a straight line that there will be total healing.
This idea of the claims that we're never gonna, I think some folks think that their spiritual practice or their healing practice is going to take away all potential negative feelings.
Like I'm never, I'm never gonna feel self-doubt again.
I'm never gonna feel anxious again or depressed and that's just a claim you can't make.
You know, so if the person and recognizing that the person Any person holding these spaces is human.
So very much acknowledging the humanity.
And the last thing I would say is, yes, when people have self-harm and suicidal ideation, that's a real thing.
And many folks have that.
But no practitioner should be saying that, yeah, that's the thing you should do.
You know, acknowledging that there is right to self-determination, of course, and they should be offering options for more support for, you know, like saying, if you're not finding the support here, let's get you support outside.
So we have to, you know, break the cult line, break the spiritual line and say, it might be in the outside community, it might be through Suicide Hotline.
Yeah, wonderfully said.
Thank you.
So, as we finish up, I'm curious, Kira, if you have anything you want to share?
Are there upcoming trainings?
Do you have events?
Do you have a particular social media channel people can follow you on or website?
Anything like that you want to share?
I forgot about those.
What do I want to share?
I want to share the work that we're doing with Collective Resilience, you know, that Hala started a long time ago, and myself and Arda Elvez have been expanding and continue to expand.
And Hala and Arda, you will, you can speak about this, you're going to be teaching this in like a matter of a few weeks.
But we're going to be offering trainings throughout the year.
It's also become a really wonderful community.
You can follow me at Instagram.
I post, I engage maybe.
I'm learning to engage more.
And then I also have a series on a platform called Yoga Anytime.
If you use my first name, K-Y-R-A, I guess.
I think you get like 30 days free or something.
You have one on Yoga Anytime too, Julian.
Yeah, yeah.
I do yoga anytime as well.
Yeah.
But people can sign up and if they use your first name as the code, they'll get 30 days free.
And you have like Yoga for Trauma, right?
It's Yoga for Trauma series.
I'm actually going to be filming the third series in June.
Beautiful.
And it's, you know, basic access to some of this You know, psychoeducation as well as practices that may be useful.
So those are some things that I'm doing.
Thank you for asking.
Wonderful.
Of course.
Of course.
And Hala, you have a new book.
It just came out like last week, right?
What's the name of the book?
It's called Peace from Anxiety.
Stay grounded, build resilience, get grounded, build resilience and stay connected amidst the chaos.
So, um, it feels like important work to get out there right now.
And so that's been really exciting.
Okay.
And so in terms of people following you, finding the book, knowing about the trainings that you're doing, where do they find all of that?
Everything is on my website, my name, halakori.com and yeah, collective resilience is the trauma informed yoga training certification program.
And so we have a module coming up in two weeks.
Yeah, and I also have a membership community.
I have my own cult, baby, called Radical Wellbeing, and if you do those three steps that I teach you, you'll be healed forever.
She's joking, everyone.
She is joking.
You know, it's really funny because I've been having to promote my stuff so much and the copy, I've hired a copy editor and like literally would, every time she would say, do this and you will, I'm like, and you might, like literally changing every word to make sure there is not this like false promise, right?
That we will engage together in this messy process of healing, right?
And so, you know, I think in these days of aspirational marketing and the internet, there's pressure for everything to appear like this glossy fix it all.
You know, I have so many things I'm promoting right now, and to just keep it all nuanced can be a challenge, and I have to work very, very hard to do that.
Well, I salute both of you for keeping it real and sharing really beneficial work in the world with honesty and great ethics.
