“Coyotes are unusual in the animal kingdom: the raising of children isn’t just the mother’s job. While the mother nurses her young, the father protects them both and brings food from the outside world. But this mother coyote got spooked; she heard strange noises at night in the valley, noises she never heard before. Instead of looking to her mate for safety, she fled with the pup.” The mother and child ran off, leaving a lone coyote wailing at the moon.
“The mother and child were never the same. They wandered in the wilderness for twenty-seven years. The mother died, and her son had no one. His journey was meandering and without purpose. His father finally sent an envoy to look for him, a young female coyote who would bring him home. After a long journey, she found him crying alone by a stream that was almost dry. The young coyote returned him to his pack, where he belonged.” I pictured the group of coyotes trotting happily into the distance and smiled.
“Dana, do you understand what I am telling you?” Yoni said, his cool hands shifting off my forehead to my temples. He was so close I could smell his breath, a pure peppermint waft. “Kai—your Ethan—he had to come home to his pack. He was not being nourished by a world he didn’t belong in. I sent Amaya, my most precious companion, to find him. She brought him home.”
I opened my mouth to speak. I hadn’t said a word since I began my ayahuasca journey, and my voice was a deep, unfamiliar croak. “But what about me? Hadn’t he made a new home with me?” Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.
“My child. Your streambed was dry. Don’t you see that now? You weren’t being nourished by your surroundings, were you?” Yoni started to stroke my hair again.
As he lulled me, I had to admit I wasn’t. I hadn’t been happy with Ethan even before he left with Amaya. I had to acknowledge that now. We had been connected once, but that connection had frayed and frayed. And I certainly hadn’t been nourished by anything or anyone in the years since our break. “No. I wasn’t fulfilled.”
“And you weren’t your true self. I can see that now. I can see that true self shining through after all the work you’ve done here.” He kneaded my temples gingerly as he said this. “Amaya had a darkness within her. She hid it so successfully that I didn’t see it until it was too late. I should have sent another envoy to embrace Ethan. Their bond became tainted just before they left the Homestead. I should never have sent them off into the hills. But I thought they would work themselves out and return to the fold.” Now he was crying. I felt his teardrops sprinkle my forehead. They dripped down my face like a pleasant rain. “This was all fated. Don’t you understand? Nothing happens for no reason. The cycle of events that began forty years ago with Saffie has culminated in your arrival. You are the true gift to the Homestead.”
In my mind I saw a red door open, a golden light glowing behind it.
Yoni lay down next to me and whispered in my ear: “You are meant to be.” He kissed me on the mouth. It was the most tender kiss I’d ever received. I could see his lips as a cloud in the sky: pillowy and pure white. He touched my breasts and I felt his power burrowing into my heart. I saw a giant snake, which turned into a slide, which turned into a rope, which coiled around an anchor, which led into a boat that floated out to sea. I floated with the boat until I felt something touch my shoulder.
I opened my eyes. The troughs had disappeared, as had Lama Yoni. In place of my trough was a tray that held a tea set and an envelope.
Janus poured us two cups of tea. He handed me a cup. “Do you know why Yoni named me Janus?” he asked. I shook my head no. “In Greek mythology, Janus is the doorway. He is the patron saint of beginnings and of changes. That’s my job here. I welcome guests to stay at the retreat, but I also welcome the ordained by taking an ayahuasca journey with each of them. You learn so much on each journey, it is the greatest gift any member of our tribe could ever receive.”
“I do feel transformed,” I told him. “I never thought I would take a journey like this. I have never felt so free, so empty, in my entire life.”
“That is the power of ayahuasca. We use it as an ordination rite because it is truly transformative. In observing your journey, Yoni has been given your new spirit name. It will reflect what he saw when you were experiencing your deep soul change.”
Janus slid the envelope toward me. I picked it up. It was soft and pliable, unlike any paper product I had felt. I opened it. Printed in ornate calligraphy was the name Devi.
“Ah, Devi,” said Janus approvingly. “This is an extremely special name. Maya Devi is the mother of the Buddha. This means that Yoni sees you as an awesome creative force. Mothers birthed the whole world.” Janus looked a little awestruck. It all made sense now. This was how I was meant to be a mother: not by having Ethan’s children, but by becoming a more nurturing soul.
Ethan’s spirit was at rest. I knew this much. It all made sense now. He and Amaya had been playing some kind of dangerous game that she had initiated, and they couldn’t survive it. Her negative energy had severed the deep connection they had to the spiritual world, and nothing could bring that back. Whatever happened to him—and everyone else—was fated. I had come here to revivify my life. Not his. All my petty grievances, once so important to me, had now dissipated into the ether. That was why I reacted so strongly to Lama Yoni that first time I saw him, years ago in New York: he was showing me my soul, but I wasn’t ready to accept the true me. But now I was finally reborn.
“It’s time for you to go to your new quarters,” Janus said. “Your things have been removed from your old room. You will find your robes—the robes of the ordained—waiting for you.”
A pretty young woman appeared again. I followed her back down the rich purple halls, and into my new life.
One Year Later
The Buddhist Predator of the New Mexico Desert
Did a guru’s actions lead to a young couple’s death?
BY LUCINDA CROSLEY
The guru’s voice on the police recording is matter-of-fact. “Two of the teachers at my retreat have gone missing,” he says. “Their names are Kai Powell and Amaya Walters. They didn’t show up for their class this morning, and someone saw them go off into the mountains.” The call alone was notable. The Sagebrush County Sheriff’s Office had never heard from the guru directly before, even though he owned two upscale yoga retreats in the middle of the county’s empty, arid land.
The charismatic guru’s real name is John Brooks, though he’s known to his followers as Yoni. His main retreat is called Zuni. It’s popular among wealthy New Age types, particularly in Silicon Valley. Yoni’s ancillary retreat is called the Homestead, and is more expensive and exclusive—it’s invite-only, and its residents are teachers at the Zuni Retreat and obsessive acolytes of the guru. The Homestead’s guests stay for months at a time, draining their fortunes in a never-ending quest for spiritual salvation.
The authorities, led by Sagebrush County sheriff Matt Lewis, started looking for Powell and Walters immediately after they got the call. Camping in the mountains is illegal because the landscape is so barren. Locals say it’s filled with bad spirits and scorpions.
It took searchers a month to find Powell and Walters, and it was too late. Their desiccated bodies were found on the hard ground in a remote cave, a sharpened piece of obsidian between them. Autopsies revealed stab wounds deep enough to nick bone. The placement and depth of those wounds led the county coroner to suspect that what went on between Powell and Walters was a murder-suicide. But the corpses had deteriorated so much that it was impossible to make a definitive judgment based on the forensic autopsy alone.
From all accounts, Ethan Powell was a gentle soul who was so devoted to Buddhism (or at least Lama Yoni’s fractured interpretation of it) that he would not kill a mosquito even as it was sucking his blood. According to a former follower of Yoni’s, Powell was also deeply devoted to Walters. He left his wife to follow her to the Zuni Retreat, and the pair made popular yoga videos together under the name When Two Become One. Now that they’
re dead, watching these videos is a macabre and intimate experience. Powell and Walters do not break eye contact, no matter what yogic contortions their bodies are making.
The journey that ended in Powell’s and Walters’s deaths began forty years ago and a thousand miles away from New Mexico in San Francisco. It’s a winding road filled with alleged sexual assault, secrecy, spiritual malpractice, hidden family ties, and a body count. For the first time, an ex-follower who had been with Yoni since the late sixties will go on record with everything she’s seen. We also have the exclusive first interview with Ethan Powell’s ex-wife, a former attorney named Dana Morrison.
Lo has warm brown eyes and hair that goes down to her shoulders. I’m meeting her in an undisclosed location in New Mexico. She doesn’t want to reveal her specific whereabouts because she fears Yoni might try to suck her back in. “This is the shortest my hair has been since 1968,” she says. “Yoni didn’t like women with short hair. He said that it removed us from Mother Nature. But really, I think it just turned him off.” Lo joined Yoni as a teenager. Despite the gray hairs and the smattering of wrinkles, at 62, Lo still has the giddy air of an adolescent. Back when she first met him, Yoni was known as Aries, and he led a band of young followers from San Francisco to a commune in Mendocino County, California.
“All the young girls, we worshiped him,” Lo said. “He was so handsome, and he had all the answers. You have to understand, most of us were runaways who landed in San Francisco. We were desperate for some guidance, wherever we could find it. And here was this sexy guy telling us we could throw off all the shackles of our uptight upbringings and live in this perfect world. It was very appealing.”
San Francisco was a hotbed for this kind of spiritual leader. According to NYU professor Darius Smithstein, there were at least 1,000 popular alternative spiritual leaders in Northern California between 1966 and 1975. “The most successful of these hucksters had thousands of followers. Your Jim Joneses, for example,” Smithstein explains. “John Brooks was somewhere in the middle. He had about 100 hard-core adherents, give or take.”
Lo said she was so blinded by her love for Aries that she didn’t see the dark side of the Mendocino commune. “I now believe he was sexually abusing some of the other women. I never refused his advances, so I didn’t experience it myself.” Lo couldn’t understand how anyone could refuse the guru’s advances. “He was basically a god to me,” she says, shaking her head.
So much so that Lo, along with two other women, fled that Mendocino commune with him on his say-so. He told them he wanted to spread the word about his teachings, but in truth he was running from the law. A former follower of Aries’s had accused him of rape.
Lo says that immediately after they left Mendocino, she and Yoni got married—but only in the spiritual sense. “I think he married me to keep me under his thumb. Sexual faithfulness was never part of our union, but I stayed because I knew that being married to the guru gave me a kind of power that his other partners didn’t have.”
They ultimately landed in New York, where John Brooks adopted the name Yoni and found a place in the downtown counterculture of the late 1970s. He ran a macrobiotic restaurant out of his Jane Street residence, and used that base—called the Jane Street Ashram—to befriend the leading lights of the New York Buddhist community. “At first he seemed very devoted to teaching Tibetan Buddhism,” says Columbia University professor Daniel Bauer, who is one of the world’s leading experts on Eastern religions and is an integral part of New York’s Buddhist community. “He said he had studied under a guru in one of the most revered monasteries in India. At first we had no reason not to believe him. His followers really seemed to love him.”
But Yoni’s fellow Buddhists soon grew suspicious. “There were an inordinate number of beautiful young women falling at Yoni’s feet,” Bauer says. “We started worrying that Yoni was exploiting the power differential in ways that were not appropriate for a leader. We were concerned about the doctrine he was teaching, which seemed to have no relation to true Buddhism. Then we started to hear stories about what was going on behind the scenes at Jane Street.”
Those stories included mandatory orgies, sexual mind games, and sacred rituals involving the guru’s semen. Lo confirms these stories, but will not give me any additional details. “It’s too painful,” she says, shaking her head. Yoni’s popularity really began to explode beyond the tight-knit local Buddhist community when he started combining his teachings with yoga classes for the public. His public front was different from his private, sexual self. “I will say those rituals were kept among a handful of trustworthy followers,” Lo says. “Yoni knew that our practices would not be acceptable to outsiders.”
Yoni was smart enough to get the best yoga teachers around, which lent his studio an air of legitimacy. By that point, Yoni had moved out of the Jane Street Ashram into a bigger studio in Tribeca. He started preaching a kind of Eastern prosperity gospel, telling followers that if they developed good karma, all manner of earthly riches would come their way. Part of developing good karma involved giving their guru a tenth of their yearly income. In the early aughts, he took on a new spiritual wife. Her name? Ruth “Amaya” Walters.
“I knew we were entering a different phase in our relationship when Amaya started coming around,” Lo says. By then she was in her late forties, and Yoni was no longer interested in her sexually. “He said that I had become too holy for sexual contact,” she says, tearing up a little. “But obviously he just didn’t want to touch me anymore.”
Walters was in her early twenties then, a recent college graduate and obsessive follower of Yoni’s. She became his assistant and gatekeeper. In 2006, she started working at Green Wave, an advertising agency, as a nighttime copy editor, at Yoni’s behest. He asked Amaya to work there because that’s where Ethan Powell was employed, and Amaya had explicit instructions to seduce Ethan and bring him into the fold.
“I knew that Yoni was going after Ethan, but I didn’t know why,” Lo says. “He’d fixate on certain people, so it wasn’t that out of character. I assumed, at the time, that he’d seen Ethan at one of the regular yoga classes at the ashram and had taken a liking to him.” It was only much later that she realized Yoni had tracked Ethan down because he had been conceived through the alleged rape back in Mendocino. His mother, Rosemary Powell—who was called Safflower in her Mendocino days—had died in a car accident in Montana in 1993. As of this writing, there’s no evidence of foul play in her death.
Even though Amaya and Ethan initially got together because of Yoni’s machinations, “Amaya genuinely fell in love with Kai, that much I know,” Lo says. “They were very sweet with each other.” When they fell in love, Amaya began to move away from Yoni emotionally. She had no way to know that her behavior would ultimately seal her fate.
Yoni was a savvy investor, and had used his followers’ tithings wisely. He invested in a tech company that went public, and by 2005 he had enough money to buy the land in New Mexico that would become the Zuni Retreat and the secret Homestead. Two years later, Kai, Amaya, and Lo went with him to New Mexico. “I had nowhere else to go,” Lo says. “I’d been with him the whole of my adult life.”
Lo says that while Yoni superficially accepted Kai and Amaya’s relationship, he never really forgave Kai for stealing his bride—or Amaya for influencing his son. “Not that he was ever faithful to Amaya,” Lo says bitterly, “but he resented their love.” He couldn’t really do anything about it, though: Kai and Amaya were the most popular teachers at the retreat, and he needed them to keep the high-paying visitors coming. It can cost over $10,000 a month to stay at the Zuni Retreat, and a reported $20,000 a month to stay at the Homestead, though the latter’s fees are not publicly listed. “Yoni needed to keep getting those good reviews,” Lo says.
But Kai and Amaya were getting increasingly sick of paying homage to Yoni, which began to isolate them from the rest of Yoni’s followers. Their isolation led to paranoia—a kind of folie à deux. “Kai became
obsessed with some Aztec death goddess he read about. He and Amaya declared themselves her followers and started performing their own bloodletting rituals,” Lo says. “They’d come to dinner with bandages on their forearms. I pulled Amaya aside and asked her what was going on, because I was worried. But she said all of their activities were consensual—they were cutting themselves, not each other—and they were just exploring the limits of their connection.”
They were already deep into this isolated experimentation when Kai discovered the truth about his origins. “We were hanging around one evening after dinner,” Lo says. “Kai asked to look through a photo album I had kept from the early days with Yoni. I said sure, no problem. I was touched that he cared. He saw a photo in there that deeply disturbed him, and asked me about a woman in the image. I said, ‘Oh, that’s Safflower. She ran away from the compound.’ He asked me what happened to her, and I said something like ‘Who cares?’” Lo shakes her head when she tells me this, embarrassed by the memory. “I had no idea Safflower was Kai’s mother. I didn’t find out until I met Dana.”
Dana Morrison Powell was a high-powered litigator at a white-shoe law firm when she found out that her ex-husband was dead. “It destroyed her,” says Beth Morrison, Dana’s younger sister. “She never really got over it when Ethan left her in the first place, and finding out he was dead just scrambled her fucking brain.” Dana didn’t believe that Ethan had killed Amaya and then himself, as law enforcement personnel seemed to think. This led her to the Zuni Retreat, and ultimately to the Homestead.
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