CultNEWS101 News: 7/2/2026

Culture & Media

Videos

Jon Atack, Family and Friends: If Scientology Ruled - Chapter Four: The Empress – Hubbard’s Holy Guardian Angel

Written by Jon Atack, author of the bestselling expose, Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky, this book is a frightening look into an alarming possible 

future – and a fascinating deep dive into the 

history that could lead us there.

 

Newsxlive: Deepak Chopra Named In Newly Seen Epstein Emails | Will There Be Any Other American-Indians?

"New congressional records detailing Jeffrey Epstein’s communications reveal ongoing contact with Deepak Chopra long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. The emails, ranging from lawsuit discussions to exchanges about public figures, have prompted widespread debate over ethical responsibility and the consequences for influencers who

Ongoing Focus

BBC: Religious group members deny charges over raids

Twenty-four members of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, based in Crewe, appeared at South Cheshire Magistrates Court yesterday [6/15/26] charged with a range of offenses, including obstructing police officers, failing to comply with police directions, and assaulting an officer. The cases follow a police raid on three addresses linked to the group in April this year, which the police said was part of an investigation into reports of sexual abuse, forced marriage, and modern slavery. All defendants pleaded not guilty and were granted unconditional bail until trial next April.

Newsweek: I Married a Photograph. Then I Met My Husband For the First Time

In this personal essay for *Newsweek*, Kiyomi Hawley recounts her experience growing up within the Unification Church and the traumatic reality of participating in one of the organization’s infamous mass weddings. Raised in the church, Hawley accepted the requirement to marry a stranger arranged by the faith, eventually finding herself standing in Madison Square Garden at age 20, holding a photograph of a man she had never met because he could not attend the ceremony.

The reality of the union proved devastating. While traveling to South Korea to meet her "husband," Hawley felt neither physical attraction nor emotional connection. Despite her deep-seated fear that leaving the church would mean losing her family and her community, the pressure of the artificial marriage—which included her husband threatening suicide when she tried to end the union—led her into a cycle of depression and despair.

Ultimately, Hawley chose to prioritize her own well-being over the church's dictates. By breaking the "blessing" and leaving the organization, she faced the terrifying possibility of being cast out by her family, though they ultimately supported her pursuit of happiness. Years later, after leaving the church and focusing on her passion for music, Hawley found genuine love on her own.

Group Profile

New Thought

The New Thought movement is an American spiritual and philosophical movement that emerged in the mid-to-late 19th century. Rather than developing into a single church with centralized authority, it grew into a loose network of thinkers, authors, and religious groups sharing a core conviction: the mind has direct creative power over physical reality, health, and circumstances.

It serves as the missing link between 19th-century metaphysics and today's multi-billion-dollar self-help industry.

1. The Historical Origins of New Thought

The roots of New Thought lie in a reaction against the harsh, Calvinist theology of early America (which emphasized human depravity and an angry God) and a simultaneous fascination with early psychology and alternative medicine.

Phineas Quimby: The Father of the Movement

The foundational figure of New Thought was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a New England clockmaker and mesmerist. Quimby noticed that when he "magnetized" patients, their physical symptoms often vanished based entirely on what they believed about their cure.

Quimby concluded that all disease is a mental construct—an error of the mind—and that the true teaching of Jesus was a science of mental healing. He called his philosophy "The Science of Health" or the "New Thought."

The Early Splinters and Foundations

Quimby never founded a church, but his patients and students took his ideas in radically different directions:

• Mary Baker Eddy: One of Quimby’s most famous patients, she used his ideas as a launchpad to found Christian Science in 1879. However, Eddy fiercely broke away from the mainstream New Thought trajectory by claiming absolute divine revelation, establishing a strict hierarchy, and entirely rejecting the physical world and medical science.

• The Mainstream New Thought Pioneers: Other students, such as Warren Felt Evans and Julius Dresser, advocated a more open, ecumenical approach. They blended Quimby's mental healing with Emersonian Transcendentalism (the belief in an immanent divine energy in nature) and Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism and Buddhism, which were just beginning to be translated into English.

By the late 1880s, independent ministries had begun to crystallize into formal denominations. The most prominent among these were Unity Church (founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in 1889), Divine Science (1888), and later, Religious Science / Science of Mind (founded by Ernest Holmes in 1927).

2. Core Philosophy: The Metaphysical Framework

While denominations differ, the historical New Thought movement is defined by a few unwavering philosophical tenets:

• Pantheism/Panentheism: God is not a king on a throne, but "Divine Mind," "Infinite Intelligence," or "Source"—an omnipresent energy flowing through everything.

• The Law of Attraction: Thoughts are literal things. They possess a magnetic frequency that attracts corresponding physical realities. Positive thoughts attract health and wealth; negative thoughts attract disease and poverty.

• The Metaphysical Jesus: Jesus is viewed as a human who figured out the "spiritual laws" of the universe. The "Christ" is not a person, but a state of divine consciousness that anyone can achieve.

3. Influence on Modern Self-Help and Secular Spirituality

It is difficult to overstate how deeply New Thought has saturated modern secular culture. When people use terms like "manifesting," "vibrational frequency," "mindset shift," or "daily affirmations," they are speaking fluent, 19th-century New Thought.

The movement crossed over from a religious philosophy into secular self-help through three major historical waves:

Wave 1: The "Success Literature" of the Early 20th Century

In the early 1900s, authors stripped away the explicitly Christian terminology of Unity and Divine Science to market these principles directly to people in business and those seeking financial wealth.

[Phineas Quimby's Mental Healing]

       ▼

[William Walker Atkinson (Thought Vibration, 1906)]

       ▼

[Wallace Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910)]

       ▼

[Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937)]

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich became one of the best-selling books of all time, arguing that "thoughts are things" and outlining a formula to transmute desire into gold.

Wave 2: Mid-Century Norman Vincent Peale

In 1952, minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale combined New Thought metaphysics with traditional Christian psychology. Despite heavy criticism from theologians and psychiatrists who called it simplistic and dangerous, the book spent 186 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It normalized the idea that optimism is a practical tool for worldly success.

Wave 3: The New Age Movement and "The Secret"

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, New Thought underwent a massive rebranding under the umbrella of New Age spirituality.

• Louise Hay: In 1984, she published You Can Heal Your Life, which directly mirrored Phineas Quimby’s 150-year-old premise: physical illnesses are caused by specific mental patterns and emotional blockages. Her company, Hay House, became the premier publisher of modern spiritual self-help.

• Rhonda Byrne: In 2006, the book and film The Secret became a global phenomenon. It marketed the "Law of Attraction" as a forgotten esoteric mystery, though it drew heavily on Wallace Wattles' 1910 New Thought text, sometimes word-for-word.

• Oprah Winfrey: By consistently platforming New Thought-aligned teachers like Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and Eckhart Tolle, Oprah mainstreamed the language of intentional living and manifestation for tens of millions of viewers.

The Core Critique: A Double-Edged Sword

The primary legacy of the New Thought movement is the democratization of agency—it taught individuals that they were not passive victims of a capricious God or random fate, but active co-creators of their lives.

However, sociologists and philosophers note that its dark side has also deeply shaped modern Western culture. By telling people they have absolute control over their reality, New Thought implicitly suggests that structural poverty, systemic inequality, racism, or genetic illnesses are merely "failures of imagination" or "poor mindset alignment," fostering a hyper-individualistic culture that often struggles with systemic empathy.

AI Research Disclosure: To bring you the most relevant stories, parts of this newsletter utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools to search the web, source articles, and assist with content curation. This content is for informational purposes only; we recommend verifying critical facts independently.

The selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not imply that Patrick Ryan, Joseph Kelly, or Ashlen Hilliard endorse the content. We provide information from multiple perspectives to foster dialogue.

Please forward articles you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

CultNEWS101 News: 6/29/2026

Culture & Media

Videos

ICSA: Meet the Author! Interview With Alexandra Stein

In this interview, author and cult expert Alexandra Stein discusses her book, Terror, Love, & Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems. Drawing from 25 years of research and her own ten-year experience in a political cult, Stein explores the manipulative social structures that allow authoritarian leaders to control and radically manipulate their followers.

Stein utilizes John Bowlby’s evolutionary attachment theory to decode how cultic and totalitarian systems operate. She argues that human beings have a core survival need to attach to others for protection. Cult leaders exploit this by isolating individuals from external support and enveloping them in an environment characterized by a destabilizing alternation between fear and apparent safety. This creates a highly damaging trauma bond, known as "disorganized attachment," where followers become glued to an unhealthy authority figure despite it working directly against their own survival interests.

Covering from this systemic control requires survivors to reconstruct a coherent, realistic narrative of their experience, strip away the cult's fiction, and rebuild trusting relationships. Stein notes a severe lack of public understanding, shared language, and trained therapists equipped to help survivors navigate these trauma-based experiences. Ultimately, she underscores that recruitment is accidental, as perpetrators hide their goals behind layers of deception. Stein emphasizes that targeted education on the mechanics of coercive environments is the most effective tool for empowering people to recognize and resist predatory relationships.

Cult Chat: Catching Up on the 2x2's / The Truth with Dr. Kyle Eggleton & Tristan Phipps

In this episode of Cult Chat, hosts Dr. Caroline Ansley, Liz Gregory, and Lindy Jacob catch up with advocates and former members Tristan Phipps and Dr. Kyle Eggleton to discuss recent developments within the high-control religious group known as the 2x2s (also called The Truth or The Church with no Name).

The discussion centers heavily on international pressure, including an FBI investigation into intercontinental abuse allegations, which has caused the opaque organization to tighten control and restrict information. The guests shed light on the group's "Living Witness" doctrine—the belief that salvation is achieved only by hearing God's word directly from celibate ministers (workers)—and trace its historical origins to Ireland. They explore the severe difficulty of tracking the group's financial networks, which involve multi-million-dollar cash donations passed to senior overseers through untraceable personal trust funds.

Ongoing Focus

News

Fox 4: Texas couple charged in $2.5M 'psychic' fraud, preying on grieving victims

The Brief: A Texas couple was arrested for allegedly running a $2.5 million "fortune-teller fraud" scheme that targeted emotionally vulnerable people.
The lead suspect used fake names to convince victims to send cash, credit cards, and gold coins to "cleanse" them of a financial curse.
The suspects face up to 20 years in prison per count if convicted, while the FBI continues to investigate to find additional victims.s

Group Profile

JAMA: "Maharishi Ayur-Veda: guru's marketing scheme promises the world eternal 'perfect health'"

This investigative article by Andrew A. Skolnick, originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1991, exposes a deceptive marketing campaign orchestrated by the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and its brand, Maharishi Ayur-Veda. The movement heavily promoted claims that its products and techniques could grant eternal youth, "perfect health," and supernatural abilities like levitation.

The investigation was triggered after Deepak Chopra and two co-authors published a paper in JAMA portraying Maharishi Ayur-Veda as traditional, science-backed Indian medicine. However, the authors failed to disclose serious financial conflicts of interest. Chopra actually served as a primary officer and stockholder for Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI), the commercial entity profiting from the expensive herbal remedies, health mantras, and pulse diagnostics detailed in the article.

Skolnick uncovers a widespread pattern of misinformation used to manipulate the media and scientific institutions. The TM movement rented university space and sent false-flag letters to prestigious journals to create a veneer of scientific credibility. Prominent researchers were deceptively tied to their literature, including one neuroscience student whose institutional advisers explicitly banned him from claiming their facilities backed TM's herbs. Eminent physicist Heinz Pagels strongly denounced the movement's exploitation of quantum mechanics as a "wish-fulfilling fantasy" designed to deceive the public. Former high-ranking defectors admitted they were actively trained to lie—a tactic known as the "SIMS shuffle"—to exploit media gullibility and advance the guru's multi-billion-dollar empire.

AI Research Disclosure: To bring you the most relevant stories, parts of this newsletter utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools to search the web, source articles, and assist with content curation. This content is for informational purposes only; we recommend verifying critical facts independently.

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

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The Transcendental Meditation Movement

The Transcendental Meditation Movement

Series:  Elements in New Religious Movements

The Transcendental Meditation Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2023

Dana Sawyer, Cynthia Humes

Download PDF

This Element provides a comprehensive overview of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Movement and its offshoots. Several early assessments of the as a cult and/or new religious movement are helpful, but are brief and somewhat dated. This Element examines the TM movement's history, beginning in India in 1955, and ends with an analysis of the splinter groups that have come along in the past twenty-five years. Close consideration is given to the movement's appeal for the youth culture of the 1960s, which accounted for its initial success. The Element also looks at the marketing of the meditation technique as a scientifically endorsed practice in the 1970s, and the movement's dramatic turn inward during the 1980s. It concludes by discussing the waning of its popular appeal in the new millennium. This Element describes the social and cultural forces that helped shape the TM movement's trajectory over the decades leading to the present and shows how the most popular meditation movement in America distilled into an obscure form of Neo-Hinduism.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/transcendental-meditation-movement/8AD646F40DC7FF8937034506F006EC94

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the west died on 5 February aged 91. He's remembered by the renowned spiritual writer, a close friend for more than 20 years

Deepak Chopra
The Guardian
Dec 13, 2008

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the west died on 5 February aged 91. He's remembered by the renowned spiritual writer, a close friend for more than 20 years

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started out as one kind of cultural curiosity - a lone Hindu monk who aimed to teach meditation to the world - and ended up as a different kind of cultural curiosity: the one-time guru to the Beatles. He came remarkably close to fulfilling his original intent. Millions of westerners learned Transcendental Meditation (TM), and a new word, 'mantra', was added to the English language. He survived long after the departure of the Fab Four, who decamped almost as soon as they sniffed the thin air of Maharishi's Himalayan retreat (excluding George Harrison, who turned into a genuine seeker and quiet ally).

Maharishi owed his survival to two things. He was sincerely a guru, a 'dispeller of darkness', who had the good of the world at heart, despite the wags who turned TM into the McDonald's of meditation and the caricatures that morphed his white-bearded image into a pop cliché. Sincerity would have served him little if Maharishi hadn't also been a gifted teacher of India's ancient tradition of Vedanta. Many visitors who came to gawk went away moved by both qualities.

Beginning in the mid-Eighties, I had the opportunity to know Maharishi as a friend. Whenever my medical practice permitted, I joined his inner circle. It wasn't necessary to be reverent in his presence. He made a point of not being seen as a religious figure but as a teacher of consciousness. Of the many memories I could offer, here is the most intense ... Maharishi had fallen mysteriously and gravely ill on a visit to India in 1991. My father, a prominent cardiologist in New Delhi, ordered him to be rushed to England for emergency care. Soon, I was standing outside the London Heart Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens wailing.

Just before it arrived on the hospital's doorstep, one of the accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking up Maharishi's body - he was frail and light by this time - and carrying him in my arms through London traffic.

I laid him on the floor inside the hospital's doors and called for a cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived and rushed to intensive care on a respirator and fitted with a pacemaker that took over his heartbeat.

I became his primary caretaker during this crisis, tending to him personally at a private home outside London. It quickly became apparent that he was totally indifferent to his illness, and there was an astonishingly rapid recovery. The hospital expected lasting health problems, but there were apparently none. Within a few months Maharishi was back to his round-the-clock schedule - he rarely slept more than three or four hours a night. When I approached him one day to remind him to take his medications, he gave me a penetrating look. In it I read a message: 'Do you really think I am this body?' For me, that was a startling moment, a clue about what higher consciousness may actually be like.

As he saw himself, Maharishi knew that he had come tantalisingly close to changing the world, as close as any non-politician can who doesn't wage war. He held that humanity could be saved from destruction only by raising collective consciousness. In that sense he was the first person to talk about tipping points and critical mass. If enough people meditated and turned into peaceful citizens of the world, Maharishi believed, walls of ignorance and hatred would fall as decisively as the Berlin Wall. This was his core teaching in the post-Beatles phase of his long career before he died peacefully in seclusion in Holland, at the age of about 91, his following much shrunken, his optimism still intact.

https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/14/deepak-chopra-remembers-maharishi-mahesh-yogi

In pursuit of wellness

The Hindu
February 20, 2017

Shovon Chowdhury's most recent novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics, is gluten-free, flavoursome and spiritually uplifting

The pursuit of wellness leads to an increase in human happiness, especially for those who provide it. Deepak Chopra is worth over $80 million. Baba Ramdev will soon be bigger than Procter & Gamble. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s attempts to promote yogic flying never rose beyond six to nine inches above the mattresses on which his yogis bounced, optimistically, in the lotus position, but the value of his real estate holdings has skyrocketed. This is commendable. The first thing purveyors of wellness have to do is achieve wellness themselves, because otherwise, how will they help other people? Currently, those at the top of this profession feel a deep and abiding sense of well-being.

What about the rest of us? Our search for wellness begins at birth, when we realise that amniotic fluid is no longer available, and we will have to find things to eat. In India, many of us are still doing this. On the other hand, many others have achieved this goal, which is why close to 5% of our population can be classified as morbidly obese. According to the National Family Health Survey, Delhi has taken the lead in this matter, with 49% of the women and 45% of the men falling in this category. This has placed a lot of pressure on the transport system, leading to breakdowns of buses and overcrowding in the metro. Flights leaving from Indira Gandhi International Airport may soon be unable to take off. The runner-up is Punjab, where 37.5% of the men and 30% of the women are obese. This once-proud state is being brought to its knees by a combination of drugs and butter chicken. Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu round out the top five.

I was a little surprised by this. I was brought up to believe that South Indian eating habits are healthier than ours, but this appears to be a canard spread by the Udupi mafia. What this data tells us is that, in India, our preliminary pursuit of wellness involves large amounts of ghee. In Amritsar and Ludhiana, which have always been more open to Western influences, butter is preferred. However, there is no escaping evolution, and over time, our needs have begun to evolve. We order Diet Cokes with our Maharaja Macs. We have an extra spoon of dahi with our aloo parathas . These urges go beyond the physical. We have come to realise that carbohydrates cannot fill the yawning emptiness in our souls. It is at this point that our true pursuit of wellness begins, and we at The Hindu are here to support you. In the coming months, we will explore ways and means of achieving this, including inner engineering, quantum health and bananas.

Shovon Chowdhury’s most recent novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics , is gluten-free, flavoursome and spiritually uplifting

Our search for wellness begins at birth, when we realise that amniotic fluid is no longer available, and we will have to find things to eat

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/in-pursuit-of-wellness/article17332773.ece, 

I was a self-help guru. Here’s why you shouldn’t listen to people like me.

I learned the hard way that the people trying to solve your problems often need help the most.

Vox
Michelle Goodman

January 23, 2017

Deepak Chopra is a fraud. This is what I was thinking as I lingered 20 rows back, waiting for Bree, my boss, to finish huddling with Deepak onstage about the presentation he would give that evening.

Bree ran the San Francisco chapter of The Learning Annex, that mainstay of adult education courses for the personal-growth set. This was the mid-'90s, when people still called the New Age movement "the New Age movement." Deepak was our big get that season. We proudly positioned the blurb announcing his lecture at the front of the newsprint catalog on its own two-page spread, rather than tucked away amid the litany of courses taught by shamans, sexperts, and self-professed real estate tycoons.

I had nothing against Dr. Chopra. I just found it surprising that moments before the dry run now underway, this beacon of enlightenment, a man supposedly above the trivialities of ego and self-doubt, had asked Bree if the khakis he was wearing made him look fat.

Apparently, I learned, gurus are people too, even gurus lining the self-help shelves of friendly neighborhood bookstores. They aren't infallible, all-knowing oracles above worrying about their generous muffin top or widening backside. They are businesspeople — businesspeople with books, keynotes, and openings in their consulting practice to peddle.

"It's all smoke and mirrors," my friend Cherise, a ghostwriter for a number of these bestselling gurus, told me the following week over tea, her Mission District apartment stuffed with piles of self-help books, CDs, and videos. "Many of these people are no more qualified to dole out life lessons than you or I."
How I became a self-help "expert"

A decade and change later, I got a firsthand taste of the guru trade. It was 2007 and my first book, a career guide for creative types who didn't want an office job, was approaching publication.

"Wonderful!" my mother said when I called to tell her my advance copies had arrived in the mail. "When do you go on Oprah?"

I explained to her that most authors, especially small press authors like me, don't get the opportunity to meet the queen of daytime television. I also broke the news that I would not be flying first class around the country on my publisher's dime or drinking Champagne from dollar-bill‑shaped flutes anytime soon. For most nonfiction authors I knew, "going on a book tour" meant blogging obsessively and visiting a couple cities where you had couches to crash on and knew someone who knew someone who ran a conference or an event space at which you could speak. More often than not, you footed the bill yourself.

"You never know," my mother countered. "Look at that Eat, Pray, Love lady. She certainly didn't sell herself short. Just keep me posted so I can tell everyone what shows to see you on and when."

Shortly after this pep talk, the marketing director at my publisher gave me one of her own. Everything was on track, she said across her large, cluttered desk. Press releases and review copies had gone out. The PR team had begun to get some nibbles; I could expect to see a couple early reviews soon and would start getting calls for interviews any week now.

"The rest," she said, "is up to you. Any grassroots steps you can take to connect with readers and build a following will help."

So began my year-long odyssey of doling out career advice to anyone who would listen. Suddenly I was speaking in public, giving TV and radio interviews, writing nationally syndicated columns and recapping it all on multiple social media accounts.
I soon learned that playing pundit is a hypocrite's game

Book promotion is both the best and worst job a writer can have. Yes, getting asked to do interviews and appearances means people actually care about your book, or at least some producer or event organizer facing a hole in their programming schedule does. It's flattering, thrilling, a dream come true — that is, until you sit before the TV camera in your pancake makeup and realize you've forgotten everything you've practiced saying for the past three days and, despite doing a hundred jumping jacks in the bathroom to calm your nerves moments earlier, your hands are shaking and your eyes are twitching and you're pretty sure you're going to throw up.

To say I was an awkward public speaker is to put it mildly. Most radio and TV interviewers are trained to smooth over their guests' rough edges. At bookstore and library podiums, it's possible to pass off repeatedly losing your train of thought or bonking your glasses into the microphone as charming. Not so much when you're at the head of an auditorium filled with hundreds of professionals who expect you to sound like you've been commanding crowds your entire life.

During one particularly disastrous talk I gave to a chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers, I took the stage only to realize I'd brought the wrong speech. I had agreed to pontificate on how self-employed professionals could stay organized. Only in my haste to leave my hotel room, I'd brought my speech on how writers needed to diversify their skill set. Flustered, I tried to improvise, shuffling through my printed pages for some semblance of a relevant talking point. A couple minutes in, I abandoned my carefully crafted slide deck, as it no longer had any bearing on the morass of words tumbling from my mouth.

"Thank you for coming today," the association board member who'd enlisted me to speak said once it was over, pressing a $15 Starbucks gift card into my hand. (Thank you notes, gift cards, and the "opportunity to sell books afterward" were standard payment for D-list speakers like me.) I smiled sheepishly, desperate to make my way to the book signing table. "You might want to check out Toastmasters," she said, nodding toward the stage. "I used to be terrible up there, too."

I met a lot of other self-help authors along the way. And I discovered there were two types of us: people who lived to write, and self-appointed experts hoping to get rich and famous. "A book is just a means to an end," one A-list blogger told me in the green room of a local TV station, where we awaited our upcoming live segment. Eyeing her crisp red blazer and perfect blowout, I smoothed my rumpled blouse and tried to forget about my frizzy mane.

"Your book is basically your calling card," she continued. To her, a book deal was a business plan — a stepping stone to ad revenue, keynote invitations, corporate sponsorships, consulting gigs, even startup capital. If you wanted to make money writing books, you had to be a thought leader, a guru. Basically you had to be Deepak Chopra.

Attaining Chopra-like status was tough but not impossible, my fellow authors assured me. The key was to monetize my expertise, as though every person I'd ever encountered was loose change waiting to be salvaged from the couch. To do so, I needed to pepper my website with authoritative photos of myself — arms crossed, face confidently arranged into a tell-me-something-I-don't-know expression. I needed an e-newsletter promoting products my many acolytes could buy, like webinars, ebooks, and $499 coaching packages. I also needed to invest $10,000 in a media trainer who could teach me to hold my own with Terry Gross and Anderson Cooper. Never mind that $10,000 was far more than I'd received for my advance and I was already behind on my rent.

If Deepak Chopra was a fraud, then so was I. As I was beginning to glean, playing pundit was a hypocrite's game.
I started to miss deadlines. My inbox was a disaster. My social life suffered.

Rather than follow any of the aforementioned advice, I zigzagged along like the harried freelancer I'd become, rushing from column deadline to media interview to public event and back again, trying to keep both my Amazon ranking and checking account from tanking, often pulling all-nighters to keep up.

I started to miss deadlines. My inbox began to crowd with angry "WHERE'S YOUR STORY?" emails from editors. Each Monday morning ushered in a new round of deciding which late project to finish first. Sometimes I'd arrive at my public talks on two hours of sleep. "You look tired," a colleague said after one particularly lackluster conference session I delivered on how writers could build an impeccable reputation. She neglected to mention the river of pasta sauce I'd unwittingly dribbled down the front of my dress at lunch.

My social life wasn't faring much better. Friends were growing annoyed with me for repeatedly canceling plans so I could work late. My fiancé asked more than once if we were still engaged. At a rare dinner with a couple of buddies, one asked what I was working on. "A story about entrepreneurs who don't work 80 hours a week!" I chirped, entirely serious. One friend cackled wildly. Another spit out her beer.
And then I started having chest pains

Around this time, I started having chest pains. My doctor thought I just needed some TUMS. Three weeks later, the TUMS I was popping like Life Savers stopped working. The tornado in my chest was all I could think about. My doctor now on vacation, I was left to my own neurotic devices. I called the 24-hour number on the back of my insurance card.

"When did the pain start?" the hotline nurse asked.

"About two days ago."

"Shortness of breath?"

"A little…"

I took the nurse's advice and went to the ER. Six hours and multiple tests later, a cardiologist told me there was nothing wrong with my heart. I'd probably been having a panic attack. The prescription? Less stress, more rest.

Publicly I was the poster child for the well-balanced, successful freelancer. Privately I was unraveling. Writing a book about creating a self-styled career you love had led me straight to a job I hated. I was supposed to be this emissary of work-life balance, the queen of controlling one's career destiny. Yet Sunday evenings now gave me the same fetal-position dread my book claimed to help readers avoid. I'd gone to the hospital with chest pains in my 30s, for chrissake, racking up $4,000 in out-of-pocket expenses in the process.
The lesson: practicing what you preach is really, really difficult. So I decided to stop preaching.

Practicing what you preach is tough. And not just for me. I've known dating advice columnists who don't date. I interviewed a career expert who advocated nanny care for telecommuting parents while trying to manage two crying children between sound bites. I know a "turbocharge your freelance income" workshop leader who's privately admitted he has no idea how much he makes because his wife handles all the money.

The dirty little secret of those in the advice business is that we wind up teaching others the lessons we most need to learn ourselves.

When the recession hit, my inbox filled with emails from people facing foreclosure and bankruptcy. People with unfathomable health problems and insurmountable piles of medical bills. One career advice columnist I knew had received letters from people asking if their family still could collect on the life insurance policy if the letter-writer committed suicide.

After one of my bookstore appearances, a woman with short gray hair who resembled my mother approached me, her contorted face the embodiment of all those desperate emails. She had been out of work a year and was out of employment ideas. She was also worried about paying her mortgage the next month.

I ran through my usual spiel about the hidden job market, interim freelance work, networking strategies for job hunters over 50. She spoke slowly, mournfully, shooting down each suggestion, insisting she'd already tried them all.

It worried me that people in such dire straits would tap a stranger they stumbled upon online or in a bookstore for legal, financial, or mental health advice. These were questions to which the only responsible answer was, "You should really talk to a qualified professional about that." It's not that I didn't want to help. It's just that I didn't know how.

"I don't really have anyone to talk to about this," the woman continued, the small bookstore now empty save for the two of us and the event coordinator, who looked to be closing up shop. "I live alone. And nobody cares." The conversation limped along like this for some time, fruitless, hopeless. I suggested a couple sliding scale counseling services and she shot those down, too. I left the bookstore desperate to sleep.

I was starting to feel irresponsible, like the only way I could keep doing this was to forget about all the people my one-size-fits-all platitudes couldn't help. But with coachology comes great responsibility. Responsibility to offer advice you know works, preferably advice you've put to the test yourself. Responsibility to rise above bullshit artistry. Responsibility to not try to solve people's problems you are in no way equipped to fix.

Advising others on how to steer their professional lives and livelihood was a job I no longer wanted. This wasn't just a crisis of skills or cash flow; it was a crisis of conscience.

I'd reached the fork in the road. It was time to make a choice: I could embrace a life of gurudom, assuming a slicker, more polished persona, selling what I knew and faking my way through what I didn't. Or I could return to the quieter, simpler life of a freelance writer. Essentially, I could go Chopra or I could go home.

I chose to go home.

Michelle Goodman is the award-winning author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Salon, Vice, Bust, Mental Floss, nytimes.com, Seattle Times, Seattle magazine, Entrepreneur and several anthologies. Find her on Twitter @anti9to5guide.

This essay originally appeared on Narrative.ly.

http://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus

CultNEWS101 Articles: 12/6/2016

Saudi Arabia's terrorist rehab actually 'secret radicalisation programme,' Guantanamo prisoner claims

"Saudi Arabia's terrorist rehabilitation centre is actually a "hidden radicalisation programme," an accused al-Qaeda bomb-maker detained at Guantanamo Bay has claimed."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-terrorist-rehab-secret-hidden-radicalisation-programme-guantanamo-prisoner-claim-a7449191.html

Leah Remini Wants the Church of Scientology to Sue Her

“They’re just sitting, waiting to sue the crap out of me, and I wish they would,” Remini told Dr. Oz. "Why do I wish they would? Because they’d have to be deposed. I’d have to be deposed, so we’d get some real information out. They won’t sue me, because they know that’s true. They know that these stories are true or they would have sued the crap out of every single one of us.”

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/leah-remini-wants-the-church-of-scientology-to-sue-her-w453213

A rare glimpse into the insular world of Israeli Jehovah's Witnesses

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"The approximately 1,600 members of the community in Israel obey the laws of the country, pay their taxes and believe that they are upstanding citizens, but refuse to fulfill one national obligation: to perform military service. As with Witnesses abroad, they believe in the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Prophets, Writings), which they call the “Hebrew Scriptures,” and also in the New Testament, or the “Christian Greek Scriptures,” in their terminology."

http://www.cultnews101.com/2016/12/a-rare-glimpse-into-insular-world-of.html

Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar power India’s hottest consumer products

"Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and Jaggi Vasudev are among spiritual leaders lending their names to everything from honey and herbal remedies to toothpaste and clothes."

http://www.cultnews101.com/2016/12/baba-ramdev-sri-sri-ravi-shankar-power.html

Yoga Guru Bikram Choudhury Settles Sexual Harassment Suit with Student

"Lawyers for Bikram Choudhury and the Bikram Yoga College of India filed papers Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court stating that the lawsuit filed by plaintiff Sarah Baughn was resolved. No terms were divulged."

http://www.cultnews101.com/2016/12/yoga-guru-bikram-choudhury-settles.html

Preacher in religious sect assaulted boy

​"A travelling preacher in a religious sect has been jailed for a year for indecently assaulting and attempting to indecently assault a young boy, who was also a member of that sect, in the 1970s.

​"​

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http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/preacher-in-religious-sect-assaulted-boy-433352.html

Documentarian Greg Reitman traverses the globe looking for enlightenment in the warm and fuzzy 'Rooted in Peace'

​"W

eighing in are a parade of peaceniks, from Donovan, the late Pete Seeger and David Lynch, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Age granddaddy Deepak Chopra, who cautions against becoming that walking contradiction known as the “angry peace activist.”

​"​

Incorporating some terrific archival stuff, including groovy black-and-white footage of John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Mike Love and Mia Farrow hanging out with transcendental meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Reitman has assembled an easy-to-digest package that ultimately feels more like a spirited primer than an impassioned polemic.

​"

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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-mn-capsule-rooted-in-peace-review-20161128-story.html

Inside The Weird World of an Islamic 'Feminist' Cult

"Oktar refers to his cadre of devoted women as "kittens." At his behest, the "kittens" shirk hijabs and traditional dress. Instead, they wear designer outfits, apply heavy makeup, and undergo plastic surgery. They also happen to be wealthy socialites."

http://www.vice.com/en_id/video/inside-the-weird-world-of-an-islamic-feminist-cult

How to talk someone out of a damaging cult

"The first thing to realise is that people in cults are not crazy but are the same intelligent, creative and interesting individuals they were before. As with falling in love they are just crazy about the group, its amazing leader and its great potential to change the world and them with it."

http://www.cultnews101.com/2016/12/how-to-talk-someone-out-of-damaging-cult.html

Tom Brady, Sociologist of Religion

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/religion-of-sports-gotham-chopra-tom-brady-michael-strahan/508913/

Inside The Minds Of ISIS Recruits

A new German report found about half the 800 recruits studied remain committed to the ISIS ideology when they return home

http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/12/01/isis-recruits

​News, Intervention, Recovery

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CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

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Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

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