What happens when MLM sales and neoliberal life coaching collide with a yoga charisma that oozes with pseudofeminism? Where do we even begin? Exploitation. Heartbreak. Toxic mimicries of therapy, mentorship, political awareness, and community.In this investigative report, Matthew digs into the background of a recent article posted to Medium called “Open Letter to Elena Brower.” He interviews the author, Tatum Fjerstad, who Brower mentored from 2014 to 2016, and Liz Fullen, who worked as Brower’s unpaid yoga class assistant for approximately three years. He’ll also play excerpts from a legally-recorded Zoom call in which Brower gives non-consensual “coaching” to a stranger. Friend of the pod Dr. Natalia Petrzela joins the story to recount her personal brush with the Handel Coaching Method. Brower is a Handel “expert coach”, and has merged the Method with her yoga training to produce peak cognitive-dissonant messaging: You’re fabulous, but you're fucked. You’re already perfect and you know what’s right for you, but you have a lot of work to do, and I can show you how to do it.Other themes include “performative therapy abuse”, the perils of unlicensed therapy, and how the power pyramids that hide in plain sight may be more vulnerable than we know, especially when we begin to talk about them clearly.Show NotesOpen Letter to Elena Brower. CW: spiritual and emotional abuse | by tatum fjerstad | Sep, 2021 | Mediummlmtruth.org's killer list of research and resourcesNew Presidential Diamond announcement: BrowerConspirituality Instagram post on "Performative Therapy Abuse"Yoga Teachers Are Not Doctors, Doctors Are Not PriestsIYNAUS independent investigation of Manouso ManosThe American Yoga ReVolution with Iyengar disciples Manouso Manos and Patricia Walden“Betrayal of Trust”: 1991 Mercury News Investigation of Sexual Assault Allegations Against Manouso Manos — by Bob FrostThe Yoga Mogul: John Friend, Creator of the Anusara School
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Conspirituality 74.
Elena Brower could stop selling doTERRA.
What happens when MLM sales and neoliberal life coaching collide with a yoga charisma that oozes with pseudo-feminism?
Where do we even begin?
Exploitation, heartbreak, toxic mimicries of therapy, mentorship, political awareness, and community.
In this investigative report, Matthew digs into the background of a recent article posted to Medium called Open Letter to Elena Brouwer.
He interviews the author, Tatum Fiersted, who Brouwer mentored from 2014 to 2016, and Liz Fullen, who worked as Brouwer's unpaid yoga class assistant for approximately three years.
He'll also play excerpts from a legally recorded Zoom call in which Brouwer gives non-consensual coaching to a stranger.
Friend of the pod, Dr. Natalia Petruzzella, joins the story to recount her personal brush with the Handel coaching method.
Brouwer is a Handel expert coach and has merged the method with her yoga training to produce peak cognitive dissonant messaging.
You're fabulous, but you're fucked.
You're already perfect and you know what's right for you, but you have a lot of work to do and I can show you how to do it.
Other themes include performative therapy abuse, the perils of unlicensed therapy, and how the power pyramids that hide in plain sight may be more vulnerable than we know, especially when we begin to talk about them clearly.
The provocation for this episode is an article that was posted to Medium on September 23rd.
It's called Open Letter to Elena Brower and it carries the subtitle, Content Warning, Spiritual and Emotional Abuse.
So the articles in the show notes, and though I'll be summarizing the main points, I encourage you to read it for full context.
Now the open letter was written by a woman named Tatum Fearstead.
Tatum works as a licensed acupuncturist in Minnesota and she grew up in a working class Minneapolis family that attended a fundamentalist Baptist church.
She describes herself as a spiritual abuse survivor.
From 2012 to 2018, she worked as a public yoga teacher and for a few years within that time was mentored by Elena Brouwer, a yoga celebrity and now presidential diamond seller, now double category, I'll explain what that means in the report, for the doTERRA multi-level marketing essential oils company.
For listeners who don't know Elena Brouwer, you'll get to know a little about her in this report, but for now perhaps you'll know the phrase from musical theatre, Triple Threat.
This would be the stage star who can sing, dance, and act.
Brouwer is a women's wellness triple threat, an extremely charismatic yoga teacher with ravishing fashion and design chops, and also killer business instincts.
Tatum's open letter describes years of hard-to-categorize stuff in her relationship with Brower.
She doesn't describe anything illegal, although when we're talking about uncontracted labor and multi-level marketing schemes, as we will be, we can be in a grey zone.
Mainly, Tatum paints the picture of a time in her life in which she was vulnerable to the economic and psychological power of a women's leader who blended yoga and life coaching into her sprouting essential oil downline.
So this is a story of blurred and manipulated boundaries between work, something that looks like therapy but isn't, and something that at times looked like friendship, except that they were never on equal footing.
It's also a story of time and energy and creativity lost or siphoned away by a cruel gig work economy so that it can be hoarded by those at the top.
Reading through it and then researching this episode Made me think of all of the millennial women I have known who have gotten sidetracked by the facade of respectability in the yoga and wellness world.
A facade that concealed a rat race of low paid and high performance work.
Some of them spent years trying to build media brands and retail networks, often for other people, when they might have preferred to be in school or be working their way into a more stable profession.
Increasingly, it's also looking like a story about a bubble that is bursting, economically and morally.
I've organized this report into five chapters, with clips from three on-record interviews and data from several sources on background.
I'll kick things off with a prologue in which I tell about my personal brush with what I'm going to call the Brower Effect.
I've never met Brower in person, but she did help to upend a part of my working life here in Toronto.
So the first chapter is, you used me as a prop.
This is a line straight out of Tatum's essay.
And in it, I'll look at Fierstead's description of a moment in her relationship with Brower that encapsulates something that I'll call performative therapy abuse.
Something that has a long history in the yoga world.
The second chapter is called The Oils Coach, and this is the story of how Brower braided life coaching as taught by an outfit called the Handel Group into her rise as a doTERRA overlord.
The third chapter is called Zoom Call from Hell, and in this I analyze a legally recorded Zoom call in which Brower coaches someone, but without consent.
The fourth chapter is called Enthrallment is Not Money, and it tracks the ups and downs of Brouwer's interactions with Liz Fullen, who describes working as Brouwer's unpaid yoga assistant for years.
Now just a note here, a yoga assistant is not a personal assistant, but a kind of in-class facilitator for a top-tier yoga teacher, someone who offers postural help, adjustments, and sometimes acts as flight attendant, bringing students blankets and pillows.
And the fifth chapter is called Sorry, Not Sorry, where we hear about how Brower has responded to Tatum's letter, and we hear from Tatum herself on what she feels it all means.
Now in addition to hearing from Tatum and Liz, we'll also hear from historian of US fitness and wellness culture, Professor Natalia Petruzzella, who spoke with me about her experience with and analysis of the Handel life coaching method, which casts a long shadow over this story.
Natalia was an early guest on our podcast way back on episode 4, where she helped us wade through issues of whiteness in the wellness world.
We'll link to that in the show notes.
And we're going to roll these five chapters straight through and then check back in afterwards for final thoughts.
And just a note off the top, I want to be clear that there isn't a single data point in this reporting that has not been corroborated and fact-checked.
There will be editorial comments, but they will be clearly identified.
I reached out to Elena Brower by email for comment on a detailed list of questions about what my sources said, and she did not respond.
She did, however, block our accounts on Instagram.
Prologue.
The Brouwer Effect.
From 2012 to 2017, I worked as a yoga teacher and trainer at a swanky downtown Toronto yoga studio.
It was a posh neighborhood, there was high-end retail space on the first floor, a full schedule of interesting and pricey classes in the two upstairs studios, and the warm and altruistic owners hosted a reputable teacher training program.
At some point in early 2016, or perhaps before, the owners of this studio met Elena Brouwer, a New York yoga celebrity with an international following.
Brouwer had also been building a multi-level marketing fiefdom on the doTERRA essential oils platform since 2013.
I don't know where or how that first meeting happened.
Perhaps the owners traveled to a yoga conference or to Brouwer's studio in Soho because for a while it was a thing for ambitious Canadian yoga studio owners to travel to New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco on business reconnaissance to see how the big hitters in the industry were swinging.
However they met, before long the studio owners had been sucked into Brouwer's doTERRA sales funnel.
And Brower herself came to the studio that April for a series of workshops, one of which was focused on recruiting yet more doTERRA customers and sellers.
Not long after that, I arrived for work one afternoon to see that a large chunk of the retail space had been converted to display oils and stacks of Brower's books and journals.
And when I went to the bathroom downstairs, I noticed that some of the treatment rooms were shuttered.
There had been several with resident massage therapists and other body workers.
I opened one door to find the treatment room converted into storage for doTERRA Overstock.
By that summer, the owners seemed to be talking and posting about essential oils all the time.
Messages recruiting staff members for adventures into oil land constituted a large chunk of the internal communications.
The language was vague but urgent.
Everyone had to find their life purpose.
Everyone had to be empowered with better household cleaning choices.
Everyone needed inner transformation and financial freedom.
Many of the younger staffers were enlisted, and prospective students and training programs were invited to doTERRA soirees.
I found it odd that everyone was trying to sell little bottles of oil to each other.
I couldn't figure out how it was working.
Of course, it wasn't.
I didn't know much about MLMs at that point, but I think that even if I had, I would never have guessed that a robust business like this could be ensnared in something so corrupt.
But that's one of the things these companies do so well.
The image management is so top-notch that it can goad even a well-organized and successful downtown yoga studio into becoming a pump-and-dump essential oil clearinghouse.
But the other thing I had no real idea of at that time was what it might have felt like on the inside of a Brouwer-type machine, where yoga, life coaching, and MLM sales could lead to extremely toxic dynamics, hidden and MLM sales could lead to extremely toxic dynamics, hidden by a pseudo-feminism that pretends to uplift women while actually spiritualizing the worst aspects of predatory capitalism.
Chapter 1 You Used Me As a Prop One view on what the Brouwer effect felt like hit medium on September 23rd, when Tatum Fiersted posted an open letter to Elena Brouwer.
The subtitle gives a content warning for spiritual and emotional abuse.
There are a lot of passages that stand out in this piece, and here's a good one to start with.
I interviewed Tatum for this episode, and we'll hear clips of that at the end, but I also asked her to read the following into her phone to kick us off.
Do you remember when I had an anxiety attack during the Art of Attention teacher training in 2014?
I was in the back of the room, trying to calm myself down quietly, and you saw that my attention wasn't on you, so you yelled in a stern voice for me to come to the front of the room.
I said, no, I don't want to.
And you said, come here, right now.
I don't know what I thought you would do if I didn't listen to you, but I sat next to you and you told me to turn my head to the left and breathe.
I obeyed.
You gently put your hand on my back, which is a confusing thing to do to someone after yelling at them when they are already very dysregulated.
You continued to lecture as I sat there in front of 30-plus women and disassociated.
No one spoke up for me.
Everyone seemed to revel in awe at your perceived magic, because they all thought you calmed me down, not knowing that I had just unhinged myself from reality in order to keep myself safe.
You used me as a prop.
You didn't ask me what I needed.
You assumed to know, and you were wrong.
But it didn't matter, because you were perceived in a way you wanted to be, and that seems to be more important to you than the harm you caused.
Okay, so backing up for a bit, the Art of Attention Training was a 100-hour yoga training program that Brouwer ran only once in her Soho studio from 2013 to 2014.
Now, Brouwer's studio was called Vera Yoga and she opened it in 2002 and it remained open until the end of that same training in 2014.
Art of Attention was the name of Brouwer's best-selling book at the time, and I'll describe that in Chapter 4, because the book was the first personal point of connection between Brouwer and Liz Fullen, who would eventually become Brouwer's uncontracted assistant.
The book was essentially a print version of five online classes she recorded for the online platform called Yoga Glow, which helped propel her global visibility.
Because this is also a story about very smart cross-platform branding.
I'm starting with Tatum's description of that moment from 2014 because it really encapsulates the whole vibe of this story, which is about a lot more than Brower.
Here's the workflow of that scene.
A charismatic leader is commanding attention.
They sense that someone is vulnerable.
There is an opportunity to use that person as an example of the mystical power of their content.
They perform their therapeutic magic on the vulnerable person while keeping the spotlight focused on themselves.
There's a bullying quality to the quote-unquote therapy.
They have no idea whether they have helped in the way it is claimed.
They never check in or follow up.
The performance of helping isn't about helping.
It's about the charismatic's image management.
And in this case, it plays out under the pseudo-feminist cover of women empowering women.
Now just a brief digression here.
Last week, I posted this workflow to our Instagram feed through a series of tweets.
I didn't give any episode context.
The comment section blew up with verification, because it turns out that this performative therapy abuse, as I suspected, is pretty common in the self-help and wellness world.
Commenters referenced Tony Robbins, EST, later the Landmark Forum, Byron Katie, Teal Swan, Scientology, You know, we just did a whole episode on John of God who literally assaulted people publicly under the guise of spiritual healing.
But commenters also mentioned some cultural forms I'm not familiar with but make a lot of sense.
Somebody was talking about fundamentalist Christian altar calls, where vulnerable people are hauled up to the altar to be healed.
Or, this one was interesting, people in pastoral care training, where this same kind of performative therapy abuse takes place.
So what Tatum describes is a definite thing, and I hope that over time we all come to identify it more clearly.
And wearing my cult research hat for a moment, I can also say that the basic confessional power structure in which the group member has their vulnerabilities highlighted is a classic power grab.
You get the member to bear themselves publicly so that they rely on the leader's grace, but also on the group's pity, in order to eke out some feeling of acceptance.
And in the most extreme cases, the confessional posture becomes actual confessional material that the leader then uses against the member, as in Keith Raniere keeping and collecting collateral on his members.
Okay, lawyers, I am not stating or implying in any way that Brouwer is a cult leader.
Rather, as I often do on this podcast, I'm suggesting that cult research has broad applications.
So, performative therapy abuse is a thing.
I'm most familiar with it in the yoga world, which is Brouwer's context.
Choosing a vulnerable mark is totally standard.
I've been in classes in the Baron Baptiste method where it's happened, where the teacher has stood over a vulnerable student who just wants to hide and shouts, the only way out is through, meaning, you know, suck it up, buttercup, or, you know, you have to get through your difficulties and we're going to watch you do it.
I've been personally made an example of in Iyengar classes, with everyone gathering around to watch me overcome some defect in my posture under the guidance of the teacher.
And that's in Brower's yoga zone, but it's also in her quote-unquote lineage.
Because if we back up two generations of celebrity yoga teachers in her upline, we'll see that this scene is a kind of psychosocial set piece that just repeats over and over again.
And the history behind it is that Brouwer would not have been a prominent yoga teacher if it hadn't been for her central role in a yoga school called Anussara, run by a guy named John Friend.
And John Friend, for his part, would not have been anyone as a yoga teacher if he hadn't studied with, but also claimed authority from, BKS Iyengar, Who is one of the patriarch evangelists of the modern postural yoga movement.
Now, I've done a lot of coverage on Iyengar previously on this podcast.
There's a bonus episode that's actually free to the public.
It's called Yoga Teachers Are Not Doctors and Doctors Are Not Priests.
So that will be linked to in the notes for you.
But the short story is that Mr. Iyengar was an outrageously charismatic figure with zero formal education who invented an entire approach to physical culture based upon postural correction, often meted out through physical assaults disguised as quote-unquote adjustments that he, and more importantly his students, associated with physical and even spiritual healing.
Now to give you a sense of not only how this performative therapy abuse works, but how normalized it is in the yoga world, I've got a clip here from Iyengar's prodigal son slash protege, Menuso Manos.
He's describing the first time he watched Iyengar teach in Berkeley, California in the early 1970s.
This clip comes from 2016, which is about two years after Iyengar died at the age of 96, and the event is a memorial-slash-retrospective.
Content warning.
Physical assault described as healing.
I was unable to get into his workshop when he was teaching here in Berkeley.
And they gave me an observer spot so I could see, which in some ways I felt I was cheated because I couldn't get in.
Other ways I had a bird's eye view that almost no one else got.
So I could sit behind him on the stage and look out at what he was looking at.
First pose, Tadasana, people standing there.
Second pose, Uddhita Trikonasana, jump your feet apart.
There's a woman, almost dead center, maybe 10 feet in front of him.
She's got one arm down and one arm up, just like this.
He said, I told you all, bring your arms out to the side.
She says, uh, frozen shoulder.
He comes down off the stage, goes down, grabs her, holds one hand on her shoulder, grabs her hand, goes like this.
You hear this blood-curdling scream.
Her knees start to go out.
He grabs her by her ribs, puts her up like this.
He says, now, keep your arm there.
Every pose he comes down off the stage and adjust this woman every time It's a little bit less of a scream by the end of the class She's got her arms straight up in the air Yes, I watched him cure a frozen shoulder that had been there for more than two years in a few hours and the way that he it wasn't charisma because that's the easy word that we spit at each other and
But his command of the subject, his belief in the subject, his ability to inspire others into this was breathtaking and beyond belief.
The first thing we should note about Manus Omanos, this guy telling this shaggy dog miracle story, is that he's a serial sex abuser.
His own professional guild has tossed him out after an independent investigation found that he sexually abused students for years.
He's never been charged, but this was known about since the early 1990s.
Now, is this relevant?
What does Manos' personal behavior have to do with this story?
A lot, actually.
Because even if you were partial to believing what a sex abuser had to say about his hero, it might give you pause when you find out that Manos owed his entire career to Iyengar.
And not just because he was a zealous student who imitated his master's dominance, but because Iyengar forgave him for committing sexual abuse back in the 1990s And gave him his job and status back when he had been turfed out of the San Francisco Iyengar Center.
So in life, but also in death, Manos absolutely needs Iyengar to be the genius who validated him, because it was only Iyengar who stood between him and utter disgrace.
It's relevant because miracle stories in the yoga and wellness worlds often cast a shadow of corruption.
Anyway, the nuts and bolts of this story about the woman with the frozen shoulder are that Iyengar sees her condition but doesn't take a history or know anything about her.
He instinctually assumes he can fix it.
He forcibly cranks her injured joint loose as she screams.
He does it over and over again, and no one stops him or questions him.
And Manos claims that her ability to raise her arms by the end of the grueling class is a cure, but he doesn't describe following up with her to see, for instance, whether her shoulder remained mobile later.
The miracle is just taken as given by the audience.
And in the retelling of the story, on a stage in San Francisco, people titter with excitement.
And I believe this is because they know they're hearing about something transgressive or even abusive, but it's being framed for them as liberating and healing.
The laughter relieves the cognitive dissonance.
Finally, the success of an incident like this depends upon the subject never speaking up, plus the group creating an airtight rationalization for why the abuse is okay.
Alright, moving on to the next generation.
John Friend, a Texas-based financial analyst who studied with Iyengar in the early 1990s.
Friend is an enormous topic, and a lot of ink has been spilled on him, and so you'll have links.
What I'll stick to for now is relaying what I gathered from the anecdotes of friends and colleagues who studied with Friend and tried to climb his corporate yoga ladder.
John Friend was famous for teaching hundreds of people at a time.
Sometimes as many as 600 people would gather at events that lasted for days.
Now, Iyengar himself was the original master of this kind of convention hall-sized class, but Friend took it more in a rah-rah direction into what we might call arena yoga.
He created a party atmosphere, he used a lot of spiritually aspirational language, and he was endlessly encouraging, or at least seemed to be.
And I say seemed to be because, as I heard the stories, there was always an element of coercion involved that echoed the way in which Iyengar manipulated vulnerable people, but also predicted the way that Brower used Tatum, quote, as a prop, unquote, as she wrote.
Now in these large scale events, often residential, in some fabulous retreat locale where it's hard to raise objections and even harder to leave and you've spent a ton of money and so the sunken costs are really high, Friend would commonly single out someone who is in a vulnerable state.
someone with an injury, somebody in the midst of a divorce, somebody feeling nauseous from chemotherapy, and he'd ask them to come up to the dais and be the model for some kind of difficult posture so that they could embody what he called their "optimal blueprint" even under stress. and he'd ask them to come up to the dais And everyone could tell that the person was reluctant, but perversely, this was like blood in the water.
They would cheer their encouragement, and it was really hard for the person to decline or to show their reluctance.
So there they would be, heartsick or on the verge of vomiting, arching up into some crazy backbend while everyone clapped and hooted about their bravery, which was really compliance.
So the vulnerable person was being used to prove the effectiveness of the content, and it really didn't matter what they felt about it so long as they could will themselves to do something difficult for the benefit of the teacher and the group.
So Friend was lauded for his brilliance, and people would come back from those events to Toronto calling him a miracle worker, and his group touted itself as offering the most intelligent and spiritually informed yoga on the market.
Now, performative therapy abuse is complicated because sometimes the subject will later go on to say that the confrontation did good things for them.
But if you scratch the surface of those stories, you'll often find that they're told by people invested in the miraculous powers of the charismatic in question, people who went on to benefit from being a top student or whatever.
In fact, in that same public event with Manuso Manos that I just played the clip from, another senior Iyengar teacher, Patricia Walden, who is, like, globally adored within the yoga world, gives her own tribute to the old man, describing how Iyengar used to kick her in the spine while she was in headstand for god knows what reason.
And she glows as she describes this as a sublime learning experience.
Point being, Brouwer is not the innovator of performative therapy abuse, which manages to both stigmatize and co-opt vulnerability at the same time.
But in Brouwer's take, we see a more formal, organized, and corporatized direction as it mixes with something a little bit more bourgeois.
Because the program that Tatum Fjersted is describing wasn't just a yoga training.
This was also a proving ground for something fairly new that Brouwer was involved in, life coaching.
And that coaching, via an organization called the Handel Group, in some ways laundered these old showman bully techniques and gave them a quote, female lifestyle empowerment brand, unquote, pastel-ishness.
I'm borrowing a phrase now from the brilliant feminist critic Kelly Deals.
That laundering served an important function as Broward differentiated herself from John Friend's Anusara.
Now, why did she distance herself?
Because in 2012, Friend torched his company by acting like a parasitic slumlord.
He started claiming IP rights over whatever his top students produced and were trying to monetize, while putting himself at the center of a pot-soaked sex coven.
He was never accused of assault or anything illegal, but his feel-good, ratter-than-thou brand would never recover.
He has tried to make a few comebacks, just the other day as an anti-vax advocate on Facebook, so go figure.
In 2012, that spring of Anusara discontent, Brower published a kind of mea culpa to Huffington Post about her erstwhile tenure in Friends' scam.
It's a meandering article that says a lot of things.
She knew what Friend was up to, but she was all for forgiveness now.
The yoga he taught was awesome, but she was going to cut out on her own.
All around, I think it was a solid rebranding effort cloaked in the language of new adventures and self-empowerment.
By the year after that, with the Anusara training pyramid collapsed, Brower launched her own 100 hours of training.
And predictably, it was as ambitious as Friends.
The $3300 USD price was roughly the same price as other 200-hour programs, so programs that were twice as long.
And according to the welcome letter Brouwer sent out in July of 2013, the curriculum featured fabulous guest teachers and rich promises.
Quote, Together, we'll study language, listening, philosophy, structure, anatomy for structural integrity, adjustments, kundalini yoga, hatha yoga, vinyasa yoga, yin yoga, pranayama, and the chakra system, the heart of our practices.
We'll learn subtle body awarenesses and self-healing bioenergetics, we'll examine our own possibilities via core Handel method coaching concepts, put a pin in that, and we'll explore restoratives.
Using day-to-day mind-sight practices, we will simplify our emotional experience and together we'll refine our teaching voices and practice regular meditation.
We'll spend time learning and teaching.
We'll be making two ongoing art projects, and we'll take away an abundance of inspiration with which to work for years to come.
So Tatum Feersted and Liz Fullan have another view of that abundance of inspiration.
Chapter 2. The Oils Coach What Broward did not include in the program copy was that the art of attention training would also be soaking in essential oils.
Okay.
According to LinkedIn, Brouwer started from ground zero in the doTERRA MLM in May of 2013, which is just two months before sending out her Welcome to the Training email.
Tatum and other sources recall that Brouwer encouraged program participants to get into the doTERRA swing.
And this makes a lot of sense, because Brouwer was ideally positioned to join the vanishingly small percentage of MLM salespeople who don't actually lose money.
She already had a substantial yoga student network, to whom the wellness pitch of essential oil usage would be right on brand.
And I remember that around the same time, yoga teachers, always younger women, started offering yoga with oils classes, or yoga and aromatherapy, in which they'd be diffusing and offering oily temple massages to people in corpse pose.
So this was a rising wave, and Brouwer was just there to surf it.
And she was so good at doTERRA sales that she went from ground zero to double Presidential Diamond level.
Okay, so this is a little complicated.
Presidential Diamond is likely over $1 million in gross sales, but the double part indicates that the company has allowed her to start a second account and downline.
And she's accomplished this in only five years or so.
So this is really fast.
But how fast is it?
I spoke with a former gold-level distributor.
This would be somebody who had been making a modest $60,000 in gross sales, but still in the top, top percentiles.
And this is a person who got out of doTERRA when they realized what it actually was.
They have asked to remain anonymous, for fear of retribution.
They characterized the speed of Brower's rise as quote, astonishing, unquote.
By November of 2019, Brower was on the cover of doTERRA Essential Leadership Magazine And in the feature interview in that in-house publication, she sums up the psychosocial and economic feedback loop that binds her yoga and oil worlds together with ideas about female leadership and bravery.
Quote, Belonging to this family of dreamers and achievers elevated my other endeavors, especially my writing and yoga teaching.
Now I come to yoga with a fresh mind that's been stretched in different directions by the work of building and sustaining my doTERRA team.
Together we've deepened our bonds, listening, learning, and leading together.
The expanding bravery I see around me every time we meet as a team is beautiful to witness." Alright, so how big is the team?
It's impossible to say without seeing the internals, but my former doTERRA insider source says that in order to achieve double diamond, a seller needs a bare minimum of 81 people acting as salespeople on their team.
And each of those people will have dozens of customers in their own downline.
So the total number of people paying upline to Brower could number in the thousands.
So, I guess expanding bravery is one way to put it.
My source also wanted to offer a caution for this part of my reporting, and I'm going to share it here before the details get dirtier.
Because it sums up so much of the great existing feminist coverage on MLMs already, including from my favorite podcast ever, The Dream, reported by Jane Marie.
Anyway, here is what the source wrote by direct message.
I think most of the criticism of MLMs doesn't accurately characterize the experience of being involved in one.
MLM criticism generally seems to over-caricature the women who sign up for them, and it also under-acknowledges the positive things that women find there in the early stages and ranks—the feeling of community, the shared purpose, the generosity from fellow members.
The very real economic and emotional exploitation is very difficult to perceive at first because it's effectively cloaked by so much positivity.
The in-group enthusiasm is, as you and I know, based on a delusion, but the quality of that enthusiasm in the average individual is very genuine.
If criticism of MLMs doesn't acknowledge this, it will be dismissed by the people it's intended to help.
So thank you very much, anonymous insider source.
Okay so Brower has the oils going on, but what about this Handel method that she mentioned in the advertising copy that she's starting to incorporate into her yoga teaching?
The Handel method was founded in 2004 by sisters Lauren Handel-Zander and Beth Handel-Weisenberger.
So let's start with the mission statement from the Handel Group website.
The Handel Method takes a revolutionary approach to life.
Through this innovative coaching process, you will come to know and love yourself, resolve your personal history, and manage your mind.
You will develop personal integrity and align your heart, mind, and actions with your dreams.
You will see and understand yourself Okay, I gotta pause for an editorial comment on the registered trademark on personal integrity because that's about as red a flag as we could see waving over the brunch patios of Soho.
So, whoever these people are, they are willing to presume IP rights over the concept of personal integrity.
I mean, I suppose it's good when an outfit shows its ass in its mission statement.
It's kind of like, I'm going to show my personal integrity by asserting trademark rights over the idea of personal integrity.
To make sure that no one else steals it or defines it differently, because I guess it's not really personal, but a universal value proposition.
It's just mind-bending.
Anyway, editorial comment done.
We also learned from the website that they offer group and personal coaching, and they're very proud of their corporate sector content.
Now I'm not sure how Brouwer found Handel, but I've seen texts between Brouwer and Tatum Fearstead that show their social circles included Lauren Zander, who is the Handel co-founder.
And in one YouTube video, Brouwer interviews Zander and introduces her as my teacher, and Zander has guested on Brouwer's podcast twice.
Here's a little of what Xander sounds like.
First, let me just say this.
I'm really glad you're here.
I know what it takes to step up to the plate and care.
I mean really care about your entire life.
It takes courage to be willing to look at what's under your hood.
And I certainly don't take my job or your life lightly.
So right off the bat, let's be honest.
If you're looking for sugary sweetness, niceties, and a good coddle, you've come to the wrong place.
I'm not that coach.
This is not that program.
In fact, Handel Group is not that company.
There's nothing diluted here.
We're coaching concentrate.
We pull no punches.
We walk our talk.
We fight, champion, and cheer loudly for your dreams.
Possibly more than you do at this moment.
And we're here to teach you to human better.
Yes, to human!
If FedEx, Google, and Snapchat can be their own verb, why not human?
And given we have no option while we're alive but to human?
I think humaning is something we can always stand to get better at.
When human is used as a verb, it puts the onus of responsibility and change, and what's possible where it belongs, on us.
So that's a little bit of the vibe that is behind the Handel Method coaching that Tatum and Liz Fullen said was central to Brouwer's yoga programming in that training.
Brouwer is currently listed on the Handel Group site as an expert coach, and a 2018 Handel Group advertising brochure carries a Brouwer testimonial.
Quote, My Handel group coaching felt like turning on a light in some of my darkest ways of relating to people closest to me.
My family, my teaching, and my relationships have all bloomed with this work.
Okay, but what about the content?
What is the method itself?
Now they guard their IP pretty closely, but one undated document I've managed to secure is a homework preparation guide to an immersive coaching intensive called Design Your Life Weekend.
Now this homework is to be submitted in advance of the intensive.
And Tatum Fearstead and Liz Fullen both said that a version of this process was part of their Art of Attention training with Brauer.
This homework document asks for participants to write up to 7,500 words, which is kind of short novella length, About how they feel about 18 areas of their lives, career, relationships, sex, body, money, and so on.
They're also asked to rate their experiences in each of those categories from 1 to 10.
And a key homework prompt is, if the area is not at a 9 or 10, what are the reasons or explanations?
Why are you stuck at the current number?
What are your negative beliefs?
So, this is the standard neoliberal idea that the only thing that's standing in the way of your fabulousness is your bad self-perception and your mediocre choices.
Is your marriage dying?
Is there a lot of family stress?
Root out your negative beliefs.
Are you systematically oppressed because of race or gender?
Design your life better.
Friend of the pod, Natalia Petruzzella was not impressed with the Handel Group coaching events she went to.
The basic idea was that you have 18 areas of life and they were these very finite areas like money, body, you know, things you might imagine.
And you can be at a 0 to a 10 or maybe a 1 to a 10 of like self-satisfaction in each of these.
And that if you really care about living an extraordinary life, you will take an unsparing look at yourself in the mirror, in all of these 18 areas, and you will work your way up to 10 is thought to be unsustainable, but to like an 8 or a 9 in all these areas.
So Natalia crossed paths with Handel Group because she was training to be an instructor in an aerobic cardio fitness program, and she really loved it.
And this group was working with Handel coaches.
Natalia was skeptical, but she agreed to go to the group coaching event because she, as I said, really loved the fitness program.
But the events did not go well.
My experience of the coaching was that, like, one, it was just so simplistic.
Two, it was very bullying.
So they had all these words that they would use.
Like, I would say, I actually, you know, it's just an example.
Like, I actually feel sort of OK with, like, the love part of my life, something like that.
I don't even know if that conversation happened.
happen and they'd be like oh you're just chicken to face what's really going on like you were always a chicken you were a liar you were a baby um like they had all it was almost like they were like selling the fact that they weren't gonna wrap up their estimation of you in this like gauzy feel good like sugar-coated language and if you were really ready to quote unquote do the work you too would realize you were truly a chicken and a thief and a liar and all that.
Um, which I was just like, what the hell is wrong with you?
And then the other thing that really got me too, as someone who, by the way, never studied psychology, but took a couple like at any advanced level, but had taken like a few psych 101 courses, it was this like warmed over Freudian
Watered down theory that they would hand you like they'd you'd have to fill you have to talk about your parents and what their marriage was like and you know recite traumas that you'd experience and they always sort of like link things back to your childhood your parents now I got in I was not a favorite of this group because I asked on these coaching calls like Um, have you studied psychology?
So can you tell me how, like, how, are you a therapist?
Like, how, how did you arrive at this?
Can we discuss theories behind this?
And that was never well regarded.
That was me being a chicken about quote unquote doing the work.
I'm like, I call this critical thinking.
So this theme of being afraid of your own power or being too chicken to do the work, it meshes with the ways in which success is discussed in very magical terms in the doTERRA world.
In that Essential Leadership magazine interview, Brower says, quote, to reach this rank, remember, presidential diamond double thingy with likely one million gross per year, mostly passive income.
I had to redesign my schedule to reflect new priorities.
This happened slowly because I resisted the concept of my own success.
We're afraid to succeed because we would have to sustain it.
We're afraid to be great because others around us might feel diminished.
I have to keep learning and releasing such misunderstandings.
Once I shifted my mindset to overcome my own impending advancement, the team began shifting too.
All in all, Natalia went to several Handel events and wrote detailed critiques of the techniques and lack of presenter credentials as email feedback.
And those criticisms made their way all the way up the ladder to none other than Loren Zander, who eventually offered to coach Natalia personally and for free, which sounds like a bit of a flex.
Natalia agreed to a few sessions out of interest, but it fizzled.
She just didn't need Handel coaching.
They just always struck me as arrogant, as having no, you know, credibility for the work that they were doing, as grossly, like, just crass salespeople who were constantly pitching themselves.
Oh, and also, if you weren't ready to sell yourself or, like, You know, act like, or to admit that you wanted great riches.
You were just like this benighted fool, right?
Like to be someone who knows what she wants is to be someone who wants to be fabulously wealthy and knows her work.
So it was like this interesting, like, kind of like capitalist self-help thing going on while they wanted you to sell their services too.
So I don't know.
I think it's profoundly screwed up.
There are probably another, a lot of other outfits like this out there and, um, I think my experience is that I now consider almost a bit like participant observation research, I guess.
So Natalia obviously has some distance from all of this now, but at the time she also had the fortune of having her critical thinking solidly online and she was also starting out on what's now a great professional career and standing as a public intellectual.
So, when I think of anyone calling Natalia a chicken, it's just totally absurd to me.
Like, you just don't know who you're talking to.
And, as she said, she was able to make an articulate nuisance of herself on the coaching calls.
But the younger and more impressionable gig-working participants in Brouwer's yoga training weren't on as firm a footing.
They hadn't been told that Handel method would be such a central part of the curriculum, with coaching-type content featured on every full day.
Liz Fullen, the woman who worked as Brower's uncontracted yoga assistant for about three years, described her confusion with the Handel material this way.
I think it's just kind of strange to...
Ask somebody to just write down all what they think is wrong in their lives as a starting point for upliftment.
And so to, to, and I was young, I was, I was in a time where I was still trying to figure out who I was as an adult and as, as this like my own being.
And I really wasn't in the frame of mind to like figure out like in those 18 areas, what I needed.
And where I was on a scale of 1 to 10, I was just like, okay, if I can wake up every morning and get through the day without having a panic, like back then, if I could get through the day without having a panic attack or like shutting down, that was a 10 out of 10 day for me.
And then all of a sudden it was like, let's scrutinize every little piece of your life.
Liz grew up in a Philadelphia middle-class family.
She started studying yoga in 2006 and teaching in 2012.
Brower's training presented her with her first experience of Handel coaching.
It took away any gratitude or appreciation that I would have had for the present moment.
Because it just had you always grasping for something else.
And that's not who I am at my core.
I found a way to actually be happy with what I have when I have it.
and where I am when I'm there.
But Handel is always like, once you get there, you're going to be fine.
Pay for this training, and then once you step over here, once you step over this stone, and once you get there, and once you get there, and it's just this loop, this never-ending loop.
I realized that I was never actually going to manifest what I wanted through that system.
Elena was good at highlighting, this is what's wrong, and this is how you're going to fix it.
Great authority.
But I didn't really mean that at that time.
That was it.
It was like, put on paper everything that's wrong with your life and then just get told what to do.
And most times it was like, stop smoking pot and eating gluten.
And you're like, yeah, but I don't think that's going to fix my familial trauma.
And it's like, no, just don't eat pizza anymore.
There's a real potential for cognitive dissonance in what we're hearing about this integration of life coaching with yoga.
Because when Liz speaks really eloquently about where she's arrived, saying, I found a way to actually be happy with what I have when I have it and where I am when I'm there.
It sounds like she's a seasoned yoga practitioner who has learned the lessons of self-acceptance, equanimity and tranquility. - Okay.
And this is just not coherent with what she describes as the never-ending aspirational seeking of life coaching.
And I think this contradiction sums up so much of the worst parts of black and white commodified wellness messaging.
That you're fabulous, but you're also fucked.
That you're okay, but you're not, because if you were really okay, there wouldn't be anything for me to sell you.
You're already perfect, and you know what's right for you, but you still have a lot of work to do, and I can show you how to do it.
It's a whole bunch of running to stand still.
Chapter 3.
Zoom Call from Hell Well There's a line in Tatum's letter near the end that really stands out.
She writes, you did your dirtiest work over the phone or in person where no one could trace it.
And it's true that no one knows what phone calls between Tatum and Brower were like, except for the two of them.
But as fortune would have it, there is an audio recording of a Zoom call between Elena Brower and someone she is coaching, but without consent, which I'll explain in a moment.
I I have permission from that person to report on it and share clips of Brouwer's voice.
The person wishes to remain anonymous.
The recording was made legally from a single-party consent territory.
The context is a business meeting.
Brouwer is the handel coach of the business owners.
The owners have asked Brouwer to intervene in a labor dispute between them and the person who recorded the call.
I'll call them the employee.
They've already set up a time for the meeting, but the employee is informed the day before by email that Brouwer will be on the call.
The employee has never met Brower.
It's clear from the opening of the call that Brower will be running the meeting as a coaching session, directed at the employee.
And she begins by following a script that seems designed to mediate the labor dispute Now the dispute involves the employee's stress around work absences due to an illness in their family.
So, the call begins with Brouwer directing a series of stilted confessions of feelings.
One boss goes first, and then the employee.
But then, there's a strange pivot.
At the half hour mark, Brouwer says, You and I are very much in the same club.
I'm happy to take this a little farther with you and give you another half hour of free time.
I think that you are a lot like me in a lot of ways and I think that I can help you in a very short period of time with just a few things.
You have kids?
There are kids, yes.
And then Brower asks, bizarrely, if the employee has a, quote, mean temper, unquote, with those kids.
And it seems she's trying to make some point about how the employee is behaving under stress in their job.
Now this whole kids thing just comes out of nowhere and it doesn't sound like a good faith question because Brower doesn't actually ask anything about the kids.
It's more like she's using the fact that they both have kids to create an identification bond between her and the employee.
And as they discuss, they agree that yes, they can both have a temper when it comes to parenting, but Brower suggests that she has overcome it.
And this gives her leave to launch into a rapid-fire sermon about what the employee must now do.
Now I'm editing out the employee's voice and a few identifiers for privacy.
Again, remember, Brouwer has never met this employee.
This is happening over Zoom.
Here's Brouwer.
I am going to walk you through this whole thing.
I expect not to like you at all.
But I'm going to tell you that.
You're me.
I'm proud of you.
You're gonna start a regular meditation practice for real.
Don't fuck me around.
Okay, I just have to, sound of screeching brakes here, stop for a moment.
I have to take an editorial detour because you are me.
As someone with two psychotherapists in my family, I know enough to know that this is totally ignorant and unethical bullshit.
You are me is the absolute last thing that anyone in any helping profession, not to mention something that can look like therapy, should say to anyone.
Total transference and countertransference mess.
No, Influencer, that person is not you.
You don't know anything about them, and if you're hoping to create a bond with them by using this language of communion, this is highly unethical because you are two separate people with unique histories and needs and, most importantly, unequal power in this situation where this is an employee with their job on the line.
You know, when I heard this, I wondered where it came from.
It sounded familiar to me, this You Are Me bullshit.
I'm sure it shows up in all sorts of pseudo-therapies, but where I'm familiar with it is from the insane book that directed the second cult that I was in.
The book is called A Course in Miracles, and I've written just tons on this fuck-shit book, and I'll link to all of that for you.
Now I don't know whether Brouwer was actively reading that book or just under the influence of the big Course in Miracles promoter Gabby Bernstein, whose huge digital spiritual junkie program Brouwer is an affiliate for.
But A Course in Miracles as a networking tool is built on the principle of people teaching each other, but in this really narcissistic way.
People teaching other people as a means of achieving understanding for themselves.
Now, to give a taste of how this is all reasoned out, I'm going to go right to the source here and read the opening of the section called A Manual for Teachers.
This is in A Course in Miracles.
It says, quote, The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world.
The reversal is characteristic.
It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself.
Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one's time.
The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same.
It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process.
It goes on every moment of the day and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.
To teach is to demonstrate.
There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time.
From your demonstration, others learn, and so do you.
The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice.
The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn.
You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself.
And this you learn through teaching.
Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe.
It is a method of conversion.
This is not done by words alone.
Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are and what they are to you.
Okay, so hopefully the mind-bending, boundary-free, intrusive creep factor is clear from all of this.
And special note here, the channeler of A Course in Miracles was a New York City psychologist named Helen Schuchman.
So this is a person who would have been clearly educated in how fucked up this dynamic is from a therapeutic point of view.
Part of what her channeled book does is to explicitly reject the previous 60-80 years of therapeutic practice and research.
And that, dear listeners, is why it is so popular in the New Age crowd.
It ditches the basic principles, but also the rigor and the discipline of boundary therapy.
And it comes from a therapist.
It's like the authority of the homeopathy influencer who used to be a doctor before they freaked out.
And then with his whole idea of teaching other people as a form of therapy, it gives license for any egomaniac to insinuate themselves into the lives of others under the guise of spiritual advancement.
You don't have to go to school.
You just have to believe in yourself and your own truthy truth.
But that's enough for that rabbit hole.
I asked Natalia a follow-up by email about this You Are Me language and whether it rang a Handel bell for her.
ABSOLUTELY, she wrote back in all caps.
Quote, My sense of how the Handel group crowd establish authority, since they hold no recognized form of expertise, is by drawing on their own, quote, authentic journey, unquote, with the idea being they're just a few steps ahead of you.
Enough to give them license to bully you and act superior, but close enough you could imagine being just like them one day too if you do the work and sign up for their training programs.
And one thing I thought was so weird about this world is that the end goal so often morphs into training to be a life coach yourself as opposed to just getting to a better place in whatever realm it was that brought you there in the first place.
Apologies for the digression.
Back to the call.
Brower has just declared that the employee is going to start a regular meditation practice.
No fucking around, as she says.
And actually, this was a good place to pause for a moment, because the employee at this point actually manages to interrupt and say, I have a regular meditation practice.
But Brower seems not to hear them.
So she plows on.
You're going to hear some beeps in the following, which indicates where I have clipped out identifying information.
I'm gonna stay on top of you.
You're allowed to text me every day when it's done.
It is not easy being a parent.
It is probably one of the hardest things ever.
I never, ever, ever want you as a mother to ever say again that it's too hard for you to be elegant no matter where you are, no matter what is happening.
You are a beautiful woman.
You are a skillful teacher.
You are over-educated by far for what you're doing.
And at no point did anything shake you to the point where you're obnoxious to somebody else.
Never.
I'm saying this to myself.
I will never, once again, do anything less than elegant to my child without apologizing immediately.
And fixing it.
Immediately.
I'm staying with you.
No matter what happens here.
Maybe you stay, maybe you don't, doesn't matter.
I'm staying with you.
You've got me.
I'm going to coach you.
You are going to be proud of yourself.
Every single night before you go to bed, you're going to remember every word that came out of your mouth.
You're going to know every single sentiment that passed through your mind.
There is not one moment that you are going to be having confusion or it's too much for you.
I know you hate me right now, but you're gonna love me in six months.
Now, the other intervention that Brouwer attempts in this very confusing call that the employee didn't sign up for, that was supposed to be about a labor conflict, seems to come straight out of the Handel method homework regarding family material.
Again, out of nowhere, Brouwer prods.
Let me ask you this.
Are you more like your mom or your dad in the sort of wall construction, The employee declines to answer.
You might recall that they're in the middle of huge family stress, which Brouwer seems to forget.
But this sets up another sermon.
Now, I've blanked about two seconds from the following where Brower mentions a name that would break anonymity.
I invite you to explore the possibility that you have made to bounce things off of, and I am glad to give you any number of prompts and help to help you get through this.
But please know that you didn't make this stuff up that you have a tendency to do, that you're being called out for.
It was modeled for you.
There's nobody to blame.
There's only you evolving it.
You healing all the generations that have come before you.
You healing your children going forward into the future that none of them should ever have a temper.
That none of them should ever act in a way that would be this strong.
None of them should ever act that way.
And I'm inviting you to the possibility that you have me to hold your hand for free and I am expensive to get you out of this when you're ready.
You don't have to be ready today.
Do you feel like you've been heard here?
Wow, what a question.
So there is one more funny not funny moment that shows how if you're following a coaching script, you can make an utter fool of yourself and perhaps not realize it.
Close to the end of the call, Brower offers coaching meetings going forward while talking over the employee when they try to say something like, I do see a therapist, but thank you anyway.
Now I can't say whether this exchange is representative of Handel method coaching or whether Brouwer has gone rogue here, but what I take away from this harrowing call is that it is possible through whatever Brouwer has made of her coaching education to use the pretense of mediating a business meeting to offer life coaching
which seems like really sneaky marketing given the offer of further sessions, instantly presume an unearned intimacy, ask intrusive and provocative questions about the primary relationships of a person one has never met, and make predictions in a first meeting about how successful the six-month program will be.
Lastly for this chapter, I want to recall Brower's statement on the call that I'm going to stay on top of you, and you're allowed to text me every day when it's done. - She's referring to the regular daily meditation practice that the employee must start, which the employee already does, but that got ignored.
Part of the overbearing assumption here is that the employee will become a coaching client.
But let's just zero in on the fact that Brouwer is inviting a stranger to text her every day.
Now, above, I've referred to reviewing texts between Brouwer and Tatum Furstead.
The PDF of that full history, which dates from January of 2014, which was during the training, and tapers off in the summer of 2016, is 113 pages long.
It's hundreds of exchanges over a wide range of topics.
It's immersive.
And on one hand, Brower seems endlessly available to Tatum.
And on the other, the power differential is clear.
Brouwer is quick to preach, scold, and even give health advice when Tatum has a fever, dissuading her from taking ibuprofen and recommending, of course, essential oils.
But perhaps the most significant portion of the history shows Brouwer instructing Tatum on how to run the social media content for Brouwer's various projects, mainly Vira Yoga.
None of this was contracted work.
Related to the you are me feeling I've discussed, at certain points in the text history, it does seem like they are chatting away as friends and equals.
There are greetings, emojis, terms of endearment, praise going back and forth.
The power differential is clear insofar as Tatum is often asking for and accepting advice, and of course doing all of this work.
But the curdled aspect of the you-are-me thing leaks through.
The sheer bulk of the text history shows one person needing guidance and support, and another accepting this dependency and perhaps feeling like a friend.
Music by Ben
Thede Chapter 4 Enthrallment is not money.
Liz Fullin started practicing with Brower in 2010.
Not in person, but virtually.
Brower has been a featured teacher on the Yoga Glow platform for more than a decade, and back then Liz said that her online experience allowed her to, quote, have all these ideas about her before even meeting her, unquote.
Liz finally got to meet her icon at the Wanderlust Festival in Stratton Mountain, Vermont in June of 2013.
She went to the event with her copy of Art of Attention in her bag, and she lined up after class to have it signed by Brouwer.
And Brower saw that Liz's copy was one of the special hand-numbered lot at the beginning of the print run.
When she opened the book, she got, she was so taken aback.
She couldn't believe, she said, I even forget what the numbers that were now, but whatever number it was, it was like something very special to her and she couldn't believe I was in front of her and all of this stuff that was making me feel very seen.
And then I had said, you know, I wanted to sign up for your teacher training, but I found out about it too late.
And she said, just come.
You need to be there.
This meeting is just too serendipitous.
You must come.
So I was over the moon.
You know, Lena Brower wanted me in her teacher training.
It's worth saying something about Brower's book here, The Art of Attention.
As I mentioned, it was published in 2012.
Because in it, I think that we see that triple threat in full swing.
It's a splashy, photo- and poetry-soaked rendition of five of Brouwer's signature Yoga Glow online classes, so there's good tie-in marketing there.
The photographers are top-notch, and the chapter forwards are written by such luminaries as Gwyneth Paltrow and Gabby Bernstein, who is the aforementioned younger Marianne Williamson type whose brain has also been melted by A Course in Miracles.
It's co-written with a graphic designer named Erika Jago, and Jago has serious chops.
Her website lists this great layout work on a big Oprah coffee table book.
She's also a yoga teacher, although I'm sad to say it's in the morally and intellectually bankrupt Kundalini brand.
Brower is also from the design world.
According to her LinkedIn profile, she graduated Cornell in 1992 with a Bachelor's of Science in Textiles and Apparel and worked as a designer for several years after.
And this shows through every meticulously beautiful piece of content she puts out.
She's not alone in this yoga design A-list pantheon.
The late Katie Griggs, the now-deceased cult leader at Rama Institute, was also a fashion mogul.
And Brouwer's New York City homies David Leif and Sharon Gannon, of Jeeva Mukti Yoga fame, had definite catwalk styles.
But Brouwer is really the best at it, to my eye.
I want to say she's like the Martha Stewart of yoga design, but I think that's just too staid, too square.
Maybe Nigella Lawson, but only with green juices?
I don't know.
The point is that Brouwer's yoga material seems like a delivery device for a total lifestyle, an aesthetic that just permeates everything, or I guess we could say, like essential oil, it diffuses.
So Liz's starstruck wanderlust meeting with Brouwer was in June, and then she describes a whirlwind of activity to get everything together to make it to New York for the training in September.
But then, when she walked into Vera Yoga, she says that Brouwer didn't seem to have a clue who she was.
After the training, Liz signed up for six weeks of Handel coaching calls.
And she eventually agreed to sell doTERRA, but was never any good at it.
She became an assistant in classes, giving adjustments.
And Liz considered that Brouwer was showing her a kind of favor that would get her work in other studios, so she appreciated this.
It was good for networking.
But Elena never paid her through a formal contract, and Liz never asked to be paid.
This went on for three years, and included things like being invited to assist at a yoga retreat in Istanbul.
I mean, this was a place that Liz and her partner at the time wanted to go to anyway, and so she agreed.
But she spent the entire trip working while her partner took in the sights, and Liz received no compensation.
Over time, Liz told me, she came to feel sour about what felt like an exploitative relationship.
She described having a bad taste in her mouth about the time she had given up, about the unfairness of it.
And then in 2017, it came to a head.
I had gotten pregnant.
We had decided to not keep the baby.
I took the abortion pill, and during that, it takes days for that to actually run through your system.
During that, this person decided that my partner at the time decided to move out of my house.
So our house together without like I was at work one day and I came back.
So it was a very traumatic kind of abandonment thing.
Talk about being triggered and abandoned.
Um, and I walked into the house and I sat down and I started crying.
And even though I had had that bad taste in my mouth and I was starting to realize like, this is, you need to get out of this.
She was still one of my first calls.
She was still the person I looked to to tell me what to do.
I didn't have anybody else to tell me what to do at that moment.
And in that moment, I needed somebody to tell me what to do because I felt like I was dying.
I felt like everything was crumbling around me, that I was absolutely nothing, that I was never bouncing back from this.
And that moment in my mind, I was done.
Liz Fullen was just done for.
And so I called Elena.
At first it was all this stuff about, oh, well, he just, he wasn't, he's not your king.
Don't worry about it.
He's not your king.
Talked a lot about like finding your king.
It's not your king.
Your king will come like, this is just a lesson.
A lot of stuff was said.
I was, I was very, I was very ungrounded at the time when I was speaking with her.
The conversation ended With her figuring out a way to tell me that if I'm going to keep this apartment that I was planning on sharing the rent with this person, you know, I'm going to keep this apartment.
It's really time for me to take my business seriously.
How long was the phone call?
Like how long did it take to get from your tears?
And I imagine explaining the bare bones of what had happened to the sales pitch.
Probably five minutes.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 5.
Sorry, not sorry.
So there are several options for the influencer who gets criticized for their behavior and doesn't do that rare thing of saying, Wow, you've really shown me something I have to work on.
I'm going to shut up for a while and reconsider things.
The options are, I think, in ascending order of complexity and lucrativeness.
These are kind of like MLM rankings.
Number one is the plain old wellness advocate who just ignores it.
Number two may be gold level.
Acknowledge, but deflect and minimize.
Number three is presidential level, which is acknowledge, minimize, offer a generalized apology that makes a virtue of humility but doesn't actually address the content, but then fold the whole episode into your enlightened brand as an example of your integrity and authenticity.
And then number four is like double diamond Queen Victoria's crown stolen from India level.
Have a Responding Elegantly to Cancellation workshop ready for online booking within a week.
The day after Tatum posted her open letter, Brouwer took to Instagram with two posts that hit that number three presidential zone.
The first one was a May I slash you be at ease handwritten card with this caption.
Yesterday I got word that there was negativity being tossed around about me in the ethers, which happens a few times a year.
Projections are real.
So I took the day to quietly do my errands, chauffeur my kid, clean my home, cook, and reflect.
The folks sharing the negativity aren't new.
They come around every few months to sling barbs, so I'm used to it.
Their complaints are mostly that I sold out.
I started working for other companies and doing things other than yoga so I could make money to raise my child.
I can understand that might be disturbing or scary.
It was for me at the beginning.
But eventually I learned that selling stellar products that help people thrive can be a big, proud part of my work.
I love my extended family of colleagues across the globe, and I'm grateful for the growth we experience together.
When I set out to teach yoga, it was about creating freedom in body and mind.
It was about giving folks what I'd been given, a feeling of empowerment, of tenderness, of fascination with humanity.
I offer practices to reorient us to what matters, to our dignity, our integrity, and our willingness to remember how human we are when we falter.
To give ourselves grace when we make mistakes.
So to the folks who choose to share negativity, hi again!
I'll always be here if you'd like to talk.
I'm sorry if I've hurt you.
I wish I could say directly to your face how sorry I am for any pain I've caused.
Please know that any pain I've caused was never intended.
I own it and apologize.
I've always tried my best to offer the tools and practices that were effective for me, but those tools and ways aren't for everyone.
And I'm not for everyone.
And at almost 51, I'm okay with that.
And to the folks who choose to add to the banter with more negativity, may you be happy.
May you be well.
May you be safe.
May you live with ease.
Now Brower says the focus of the generalized negativity she gets is related to her MLM sales.
She writes, their complaints are mostly that I sold out, I started working for other companies and doing things other than yoga so I could make money to raise my child.
Well, firstly, that's not what Tatum's letter is about at all.
But even if it was, this is probably Brower's weakest possible defense because it sounds like it's written directly by the doTERRA PR department.
Of all of the behaviors reported here, the one that is most objectively questionable is being boss lady at the top of an MLM downline.
Because the research and numbers don't lie.
MLMs are predatory scams and anyone who says otherwise is probably highly motivated.
So in response to Tatum's letter, which basically says, you emotionally and financially exploited a younger woman for the benefit of your brand, Brouwer hauls out a defense of predatory capitalism.
Later that same day, Brower posts an IG Live that is just over 30 minutes long, and there's two parts to it, and it's really interesting.
The two parts are basically paraphrased.
Number one, here I am, supporting women yoga authors, and here are some nice quotes from their new books.
And number two, Tatum, you should have come to me in private.
I would never try to ruin anyone like this.
And what I saw in your letter was the same wounded little girl I knew years ago.
And nothing has changed.
Again, I'm paraphrasing.
With Part 1, Brower establishes women's empowerment credibility, but with Part 2, she dismisses a woman who is a former student with grievances.
Now Brower's first choice for book promotion in this Instagram Live is super interesting and shows just how intricate and historically charged this landscape can be.
She's reading from a new book by Judith Lasseter, who she calls one of her dearest teachers.
Lasseter is a matriarch of the American yoga world and also one of BKS Iyengar's most successful students.
Do you remember him from Chapter 1?
There's a kind of yoga halo around Lassiter.
She's traditional, but also facing forward.
She spoke out against Manuso Manos in the 1990s when his sexual abuse came to light.
But then she never really criticized Iyengar for giving him his job back.
And she never openly acknowledged that Iyengar himself was a physical abuser.
But it's also Yoga World Gospel that she took the best of what Iyengar had to offer and softened it for the women's wellness market.
She's the main innovator of restorative yoga, if you've heard of that.
So she has maintained a strong connection to Iyengar, as did John Friend, but she has also built her brand on progressing beyond the old school while never really criticizing it.
So if there was a better senior female yoga influencer for Brouwer to tie her star to in a moment of crisis, I don't know who it would be.
And then get this, Brower introduces the book by announcing that she'll be co-leading an upcoming retreat with Lasseter on non-violent communication, which Lasseter has actually written a book in.
Here's the passage from Lasseter's book that Brower reads.
Our students belong to themselves.
Every teacher will have students who come once, never again.
Let go of them.
Every teacher will have students who come for decades and then suddenly have the urge to leave your classes and study with another teacher, perhaps even study a completely different style than you teach.
Let go of them.
Remember, we are the bucket and not the water.
Gracefully send them on their way with love.
That is the healthiest and most evolved response.
Notice a ripple if it comes of disappointment or jealousy.
Note any thoughts that tell you in some way their departure is your failing.
These students have gotten what they need from you and may be off to become teachers themselves and thus your colleague.
Or they may simply disappear without a trace.
I really gotta hand it to Brower here because what a smashing quote to use at the front end of addressing a call-out.
It sounds super poetic, but also super avoidant.
And it shows how deftly the quasi-Buddhist language of non-attachment can be mobilized during an accountability challenge.
Everything is impermanent.
If we could only understand this, how would any of us hold grievances?
Isn't that the true teaching?
So Brouwer goes on to promo several other books, all by women, and for me the other standout is Embrace Yoga's Roots by Susanna Barkataki.
Now, full disclosure, I haven't met Susanna in person, but we know each other from some remote work that we've shared, and I appreciate how she addresses issues of decolonization in yoga.
Her content is accessible, it's forward-thinking, but in a world in which there are a lot of white charismatics trying to figure out how to brand-wash, I'm afraid her work is also vulnerable to co-optation.
Here's Brower.
I will actually be doing an event with her in late October.
I think it's the 26th.
I want to say I'm helping on her book tour.
One of the most important books of this year.
Here we sort of take ownership of our role in diluting the practices.
We honor the source of the practices.
I'm thinking about Yoga Gives Back right now.
I'm also thinking about Give Back Yoga right now to organizations with which I'm affiliated.
I find it's a very important thing to be very direct and honest with myself and I'll address sort of the current events toward the end of this live.
I want to really focus on the teachers and their work here.
One of her reflection questions, I'm on page 119, once again embrace yoga's roots.
Where in your life and practice are you more of a bystander?
Where are you more of an ally?
And where are you more of an accomplice?
It's an interesting question to ask as a yoga teacher because there's no shortage of temptation to just perform and pretend.
But how do we put our money where our mouths are?
How do we put our practices What stands out here is that Barkataki's language of bystander, ally, and accomplice specifically refers to what people are prone to do according to their privilege when there's an injustice to be addressed.
This livestream is ostensibly Brower's response to the open letter, and she is elevating the language of restorative justice from the work of a BIPOC writer in a way that I believe distracts from her precise situation.
It's dizzying.
So I sent Susannah two questions by email.
I wrote, Your formulation of bystander-ally-accomplice is rooted in decolonization discourse and a critique of capitalism.
Given that Brower probably makes a million plus per year as a rep for an exploitative MLM, do you feel she's understanding your book?
Or is she co-opting?
Or is she tokenizing?
And then the second question was, she mentions that she'll be supporting a book event with Hugh on October 26th.
Is that something you'll be going through with, given the circumstances?
Susannah wrote back, quote, I absolutely will not be doing the book event with Elena Brower.
I read Tatum Fearstead's open letter and was upset by what I learned.
I also did not know that information about Elena and the MLM.
Thank you for linking it.
Wow.
Judith Lasseter did not respond to my request for comment.
So that Instagram Live closes out with Brower addressing, quote, the elephant in the room to the people who accuse me of all sorts of fascinating things, projections, even abuses.
I'll just bullet point what Brower says.
She says she was always open for feedback and resolution, and that Tatum should have come to her directly.
She claims that she hasn't read the letter because she is blocked but then the letter is on medium.
But then she later comments negatively on how the letter was written and that she's not surprised given who it came from.
She says that given all the points the letter made, quote, I cannot consciously say that anything is different now.
What I saw then in the sadness and in the questions was someone I desperately wanted to help, tried with every bone in my body and couldn't.
Anytime I really reached out to help, anytime I did what someone else did for me to help me get sober or get clear, I was met with resistance and now I'm being called an abuser.
There are, I guess, three things that allowed me to come forward.
and And the first was knowing that publishing this wouldn't change Elena's behavior, but would provide solidarity for people who have experienced similar harm at the hands of Elena or even people like her.
And that's a solidarity that I know that I've craved for the last five years, so I imagine that other folks were also looking for that sort of connection, and I wanted to open the door to that.
That's Tatum Fearstead.
I'll close out this report with some reflections from her.
I've been learning a lot about how white cisgender women are the gatekeepers of the patriarchy and how we protect it to serve our own best interests.
And I really want to stop doing that.
And after trying multiple times to say something to Elena privately, I felt like by not saying anything publicly, I was continuing to protect and enable another harm causing white woman.
And I didn't, I didn't want to do that anymore.
And finally, I've needed a lot of therapy to get to this place.
Telling the truth with clear boundaries and a clear goal, as I stated in the letter, was not something I could do before I understood why I was attracted to someone like her.
Why did I stay in that relationship as long as I did?
And why, even years later, when her name gets mentioned, why do I have this visceral negative response?
And thanks to my licensed therapists, I have a lot of clarity and self-compassion and tenderness towards the woman I was and how I ended up in that situation, and I feel like I'm able to clearly articulate that in the letter, and I'm proud of what I did.
I wanted to circle back to Tatum's second reason for publishing her letter.
She talked about how white women were gatekeepers of the patriarchy, and I wanted to know, with the yoga industry now led and consumed by 80% women, and with coaching outfits like Handel that are founded and primarily led by women, how did she understand patriarchy as being a driving force?
She explained that it wasn't about gender, but domination.
About hierarchies of power and leaders not being accountable or interested in sharing power.
And that when women engage in these old dynamics, it's just more of the same.
And she said that this was something familiar to her from the past.
I learned firsthand that it's a lot like the fundamentalist Baptist church I went to as a child.
The framework of the MLM, the life coaching, sort of shame-based leadership that exists within those, it's the same.
And that's why I was drawn to it.
I mean, I thought I was doing something else.
When I first found these things because it was yoga, because it was all masked with this, like, we are all one stuff that needs to be talked about more.
And I had this sense of, You're either fully in, or, in Elena's case, you're pretending that you are, and lying about it for the benefits of her posting about your work, or you're an outcast.
It feels like middle school.
In order to be a part of the cool girl group, I have to betray myself, my intuition, I have to give up my lunch money, and pretend that things like science, confirmation bias, and late stage capitalism aren't real.
At the top of the episode, I offered the opinion that the main subject here really wasn't Elena Brouwer or crappy pseudo-business relationships.
Brouwer didn't create the charisma-based yoga industry that she excelled in.
She didn't dream up Handel coaching or distilled doTERRA oils.
She doesn't make the little bottles or the labels.
And she may not to this day see anything wrong with these economies, especially if she feels her intentions are good.
Brower applied her considerable aesthetic and performative skills to what she found, and she made it all look better, feel better, and sell bigger.
And who wouldn't want to do that with their skills?
And really, in a boundaryless, sleepless world of quickly fragmenting relationships, a decline in institutional credibility, and an explosion of seemingly endless alternative possibilities, is it that surprising that a confident person would come to believe that they had special insights into psychology and spirituality?
Or that they could solve a stranger's problems in six months, or even a Zoom call?
And worse, what if they were roped into monetizing that confidence?
And what would happen if no one ever said, hey, slow down, until they got an open letter?
What would happen, I think, is what happens all the time.
They would coast, they would surf, they would assess the social and financial rewards coming their way as signs of grace.
In that terrible Zoom call, Brouwer says a very wise thing, although for dodgy reasons.
Please know that you didn't make this up, Brouwer says.
It was modeled for you.
There's nobody to blame.
There's only you evolving it.
You heal all the generations that have come before you.
You heal your children going forward into the future.
That sounds good.
The question is how?
Just as this story is about more than Brower, from Tatum Feuerstedt's point of view, it's also about more than her.
So I'll let her have the last word on that for this chapter, and we'll also link to some of Tatum's favorite resources in the show notes.
I'm white.
I'm able-bodied.
I'm a cisgender woman.
I have thin and pretty privilege.
I have access to mental health support.
And I think that's part of the reason this letter made ways.
I know I'm not the first person to talk about this stuff.
But, you know, it's like the Gabby Petito stuff where it's this very beautiful blonde white girl, this terrible thing happened to her.
But there's so many other black and brown people who have gone missing that no one's talking about.
And I know that people from the BIPOC, fat, trans, and disabled communities have been asking this white-led industry to do better for a long time.
And we just keep ignoring them.
And that's really problematic.
As much as this interview feels like talking about what I experienced, I want to de-center myself in this conversation and make sure that we're elevating the voices that have actually been talking about this stuff for a while that we don't listen to.
So I'd really like to thank Tatum Feirsted and Liz Fullan and Dr. Natalia Petroszko.
Thank you.
Derek, Julian, thoughts?
What did you come away with?
Well, it's a huge topic and I want to just say good work, Matthew.
You know, for this week, I've been learning more about MLMs and I've shared a little bit about that on social media.
and the intersection with wellness.
When you've got this intersection between charismatic influence via yoga and then amplified by social media outreach in these times, then colliding with the abundance grip of boss babe coaching culture that links self-worth and empowerment to entrepreneurial wealth. then colliding with the abundance grip of boss babe coaching
And that's all via the aspirational pseudoscience of these snake oil lifestyle products presented within the explosive structure of multi-level marketing, where every customer becomes a sales drone who's told to believe they can become the queen by in turn making new drones out of friends and family usually.
It's so complicated, but it's also kind of seamless in terms of the themes that we track on this podcast.
So in terms of those dynamics, I also want to flag here, and I'll talk about this more on social media this week as well, that this style of influence, along with the alternative health and wellness claims that characterize a lot of MLM culture, seems to make those sucked into these networks especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
The almost magical yet entirely unevidenced alt-health claims made about their products Are often held as religious truths by those with everything at stake, who already identify as marginalized outsiders with some kind of special knowledge, right?
And so we know, and we've covered this somewhat on the pod, toward the end of 2020, our friend Ben Lee wrote an open letter urging doTERRA CEO Dave Sterling to take a public position condemning doTERRA wellness advocates who were using their platforms to promote QAnon.
And the company seemed to initially respond well, but that statement has since disappeared to be replaced with a very wishy-washy walk back that apologized for offending any of the members who might have felt shamed.
And we've observed and several people have messaged us to this effect that since then, several high profile doTERRA reps, some of whom are at the like $1 million to $3 million a year presidential diamond earning level, have continued to weave appeals to natural immunity, claims have continued to weave appeals to natural immunity, claims about which oils will give protection against viruses, and of course, anti-vaccine messaging into their otherwise very slick invitations to join the spiritual and financial elite.
By of course signing up onto their already massive downlines.
When I was producing this episode, because obviously listeners, we've pre-recorded much of it, I couldn't help but think of the red flag meme that has been going around Twitter.
I included one on our Instagram page, but basically it's just saying things that should be red flags.
And MLMs are just red flags, always.
Like they always have been.
I remember my massage therapist back in New York, who was a good friend, but you know, She was a young living oil rep and at one point said, you know, I think you do really well.
And I didn't know enough about him back then, but I was like, she's like, I think you could sell these.
You, you know, you have that personality.
And I'm like, no, I don't.
I see you.
I was like, there's no, you're like me.
And to her credit, that was it.
She never brought it up again, but it was just kind of like a little touch to see.
Any sort of structure, pyramid scheme like this, the fact that it's not super apparent that you have to buy the product to sell the product, I wish there were more guardrails.
I mean, I know we have serious problems with the way that the FDA operates and What can be treated as a drug and what can be a supplement, a dietary aid?
And that spills over into this world because there are so many health claims that are made with these oils that are just bullshit.
And I have nothing against oils.
They smell good if you put them in a diffuser.
It's nice to create an ambiance.
I buy them on occasion, but to think that it would go to the extremes helped To cure cancer or some of the other ridiculous claims that I've heard is not fair to the people that you're exploiting on your downline.
And crossing over into that is also this phenomenon we've touched a little bit upon on this podcast, which is the fact that you can call yourself a coach and start a business.
You don't need any certifications whatsoever to do that.
And I know licensed psychotherapists that really have a problem with this because there's no training whatsoever.
And like anything else, it's a hustle, but the top performers make vastly more money than an actual licensed psychotherapist, psychoanalyst will make.
And they don't necessarily have any experience with actually helping people.
And as you heard in this episode, it can be very dangerous to people.
That moment when there was the, well, you're going to meditate the right way now.
No fucking around.
Yeah, that is so, if anyone ever said that to me, I would have hung up at that moment.
And it's just really, really, it was so troublesome hearing so much of this episode, but I'm really glad you tackled it.
And so thank you for that.
Yeah.
Well, thanks, Derek.
I mean, I wanted to say about that particular moment that listening through that call, I think there are a number of points in which Many listeners would say, oh, that would be it for me or I would I would hang up.
But I actually think that there's a type of coaching that relies upon generating a kind of freeze response.
Because it's not about dialogue at all, actually.
It's about confrontation, and it's about shock and awe, and there's just this clear sort of dominance structure to it that the person on the receiving end, you know, is you know, can, can really be paralyzed.
And so, yeah, I think there's something about the method itself that, that is like, it's not going to let you hang up.
That's part of the, that's part of the hook.
Let me be fair with that statement.
I want to clarify because I can say that in hindsight, you know, not being involved, but if I was in the moment, who knows what I would have done.
So I want to be fair because I have been in power dynamics like that before, where I have been more or open to manipulation in that sort of environment.
I think maybe now I'd do a little better with it, but you can never tell until you're in the moment.
And I'm just glad that that person was able to record and had the foresight to do that.
Yeah, I want to just say too along the lines of what you were saying, Derek, that the lack of training as opposed to a psychotherapist, actually they've had lots and lots of training.
And I know there are plenty of coaches operating in good faith who are nice people and try to be ethical.
A lot of the coaching programs that I've looked over and that I've heard about, there's plenty of training in how to sell and how to enroll people and how to do almost like that cold reading, this kind of form of psychological cold reading where you almost have scripted responses to objections and to attempts to take the process elsewhere or to say actually no, this is not what I want, right?
Well, that's a very valid point there because I do know that Some coaches have taken training.
I was just trying to make the point that you don't actually have to.
You can just start a coaching service and go and try to sell yourself without anything.
Now, having those certificates adds some shine to it, some authenticity that you can then show to clients saying you've done it, but it's not actually a requirement.
I mean, my tendency here in closing is always going to be to come back around to the underlying philosophical positions that manifest this reality, so to speak.
I mean, I feel like the yoga and wellness space over time has more and more become characterized by these soundbite shortcuts, you know, that are based more on exploiting people's needs and fears than any actual contemplative inquiry that holds our humanity with a kind of compassion and respect for the difficulty of, you know, what really goes on.
In many people's inner worlds.
And this dovetails perfectly with the persuasive sales psychology that has evolved along with the internet into ever more virulent strains.
The soundbites will say things like, you create your own reality instead of something more complex, like we're each shaped within a context of genetic, familial, social, and political factors.
Or stop acting like a victim and you'll be empowered and abundant, just like that, right?
Instead of a more compassionate recognition that actually victimization is very real and it affects us in ways that are difficult and unglamorous to disentangle.
Oh, for sure.
Right?
And that real inner work doesn't actually have a direct causal relationship to financial status, right?
That you're going to be wealthy and empowered and beautiful if you do this very quick superficial technique that supposedly clears your energy blocks, right?
So because there's a way of using these aspirational promises to keep enrolling people deeper into a sales funnel by always Identifying the sense of lack or anxiety in the customer instead of the product, the next step in finally becoming whole and getting everything you want within an alluring community with an all-knowing leader at the top of it, it's always just a frictionless click away via very well-crafted branding.
And in the end, it's not actually that complicated because if the premise is that The power to overcome all of your life's difficulties is already within you, then you're always to blame for the course, the training, the entrepreneurial grift not delivering.
But hey, not to worry because this next opportunity I have to sell you is gonna change everything.
It's actually incredibly smart.
It's like a completely self-sealing system.
Yeah, so I think in terms of some kind of moral to the story, it's just that these oversimplified soundbites that do the work of blurring all of these categories that we've been talking about within the presentation of a totalizing lifestyle transformation, that's the answer to all your problems.
That's the enormous red flag.
And it would be, you know, my Wish my hope that somehow People entering the wellness space would be educated to recognize that red flag right away But it's an uphill battle because in a lot of ways the industry is built on and made lucrative by precisely these manipulative tactics
Well, I want to thank you both for bringing a broad lens to the end here, because as I've said a number of times during the reporting, you know, this is much bigger than the characters involved.
But there is one specific thing that I think we can say about behaviors, not about the personal behavior of Elena Brouwer, which we'll never really know the truth about.
And so imagining who she might become in the world or how she might act differently, if that's what she should do or if that's what she can do, it's all very vague and idealistic.
But I do think the one thing that a person in her position can do if she wants to make the world a better place is to stop being an upline overlord for an MLM.
This is not something that requires therapy.
You don't have to, like, figure out where everything went wrong.
You don't have to make amends.
In fact, you know, Tatum Fjersted in her letter is really clear about what she doesn't need, which is she doesn't need an apology or any kind of sort of closure.
She wants to describe an experience and make people aware of its possibility.
Yeah, so to turn away from the toxic business structure is not psychologically complex, it's not interpersonally taxing.
You might lose some money, but compared I think with the soul-searching that might really be in store, I think that's a low cost and it's undeniably the right thing to do.
In my research, I found the doTERRA policy manual and I read through it and I found a section called transfer of distributorship position because I was wondering like, well, what's the exit plan here?
Like how do people get out of this?
What happens when they die?
Yeah, so there's a section 21b that talks about how the position within the organization can be sold, it can be gifted, it can be queethed to anyone else with the written permission of the company.
Now, the transferee would secure that position and all of its income.
And I was just thinking about all of the people who could use the passive income of the double presidential diamond position to actually fund and stabilize an in-real-life social justice project.
And then, you know, once that had played out, once that was stable, that project was done, they could slowly let their position in the company wither on the vine.
And then the other thing about this is that I was told by that former gold-level seller, the actual structure is really a house of cards.
Because if somebody in a high position pulls out, the upline is disrupted, the downline is orphaned, because the whole thing is a confidence game.
So if key middle So anyway, what I'm proposing doesn't take confession or therapy, it's really just about taking a clear look at the tons of research out there and reporting out there on the toxicity of the MLM model and you can look to all of the links we've provided in the show notes.
