“It made no fucking sense,” Beth says, wiping away tears as I interview her over a latte at a Hungarian café in Manhattan. “I tried to talk her out of it. The only part of it I understood was that Dana is a tenacious person. When she gets an idea in her head, there’s no convincing her to drop it.”
Lo first met Dana when she was staying at the Zuni Retreat, hoping to learn more about who her husband was in the years before he died. “We really bonded,” says Lo. Dana stood out to her, and she mentioned her to Yoni. Yoni, to Lo’s surprise, suggested that Lo invite Dana to the Homestead, which was a respite for only the most devoted visitors to the Zuni Retreat. “He hadn’t let me invite any students to the Homestead thus far,” Lo says, “and he’d never let anyone invite someone so new to our process.” Lo looks down in shame. “I realize now that he told me to invite her because he knew she was Ethan’s ex.”
When Dana got to the Homestead, Yoni enrolled her in Lo’s Inner Child Workshop to keep a close eye on her. “She was the hardest-working student I have ever had, and we really made progress,” Lo says. They made so much progress that Dana felt she could tell Lo the truth about her identity. “She said that Safflower was Kai’s mother, and Yoni was his real father, and that she believed that Kai had figured it out.” Lo laughs. “I was so clueless, I didn’t even know Amaya and Kai were dead. I thought they had just gone on a spiritual journey somewhere. Yoni said we were never to speak of them or it might hurt their silent journey, and I believed him.”
Lo was so shaken by Dana’s admission, she felt she needed to work through it. So she went to her two oldest friends, the only two women who were still around from the Mendocino days—they go by the names Veena and Dew—to tell them about it. They surprised her by informing her about everything that Yoni had shielded from her for all those years. “Veena said, ‘You old fool. How did you not know who Kai really was?’ I guess I kept my head in the sand for a lot of years as a way of coping.” Lo starts crying at this point in our interview, and asks for a few minutes alone to collect herself.
When she returns she has a woven handkerchief in her right hand that she will clutch tightly for the rest of the interview. She tells me what she knows about Ethan’s and Amaya’s deaths. “According to Veena, Yoni knew that Ethan had discovered the truth about his origins, and he decided the best course of action was to freeze Ethan and Amaya out completely. Yoni knew that having two people who no longer believed in his hype could poison his entire following. So he started taking their classes away from them one by one, moving them to the worst room at the Homestead, and ignoring them when he would pass them in the hallway.”
This only compounded the pair’s paranoia. Ultimately, they felt their sole option was to flee into the hills. Only Ethan and Amaya will ever know exactly what went on in that cave, but based on the evidence and their behavior before leaving, Lo believes it was a self-inflicted accident for both of them. “Because of the stab wounds, I bet they were doing one of their cutting rituals. It just went too far, and because they were all alone in the desert, they couldn’t get help.”
After putting all of this together, Lo confronted Yoni about what she knew. “He denied the whole thing, of course,” Lo says. “He said he never froze them out, but that they left to do their own spiritual work. He said their deaths were a very sad thing, but it was fated because they had bad karma. He claimed that he had no idea about Safflower’s connection to Kai.”
At that point, Lo decided it was time to leave. She found another ex-follower of Yoni’s here in New Mexico who helped her get back on her feet. “He knew I had been isolated from the real world for so long. I never had a bank account of my own. I never paid a bill or found an apartment.” This follower helped her with all the quotidian details of life in the twenty-first century. Lo fell in love with him, to boot. “He’s probably the only person who could understand everything I’ve been through.” She will not allow me to print his name for fear of retribution from Yoni’s camp.
“I assumed Dana would be okay, so I left without saying good-bye to her,” Lo says. “She was only supposed to be staying for a month and I thought she had a good head on her shoulders. Leaving her was the worst decision of my life.”
There is still a photograph of Dana Morrison Powell on her LinkedIn profile. She’s wearing a suit that leaches the color out of her already pale face. The photograph looks nothing like the Dana I see before me on-screen. She has agreed to a Skype conversation from the Zuni Retreat. Numerous requests to visit the retreat and the Homestead have been denied, and I was escorted off the land when I tried to approach without explicit permission.
This interview has been granted through Lama Yoni’s publicist, though the Lama himself will not speak on the record. Yoni’s lawyer has denied all of Lo’s assertions about Ethan Powell’s and Amaya Walters’s deaths. “Lo is a bitter ex-lover of my client’s,” says David Rappaport, who has represented John Brooks and his business interests for decades. “There’s no proof of any of her assertions, and I would think a publication like yours would not be interested in exaggerations and outright defamatory falsehoods peddled by such a person.”
Dana—who tells me to call her Devi because “Dana is my past; Devi is my now”—has a much more relaxed expression than her earlier photo depicts. Her hair falls around her face in long, gentle waves. She has a deep tan and is wearing a light-purple robe. I ask her what she thinks happened to Ethan and she gives me a condescending, tight-lipped smile. “Ethan’s journey led him to that cave, where his spirit came to rest. He had incredibly bad karma, in part because he left me the way he did.” What about the connection between Ethan’s mother and Yoni? Doesn’t that seem like a strange coincidence? “It’s all written in the stars,” she says. “It was the necessary step to bring me to Yoni.”
I ask her about Yoni. “Yoni has completely changed my life,” Dana says. “I used to be a sad, angry little person. I had no peace. I am actualized. I am living in my now.” I try to get her to explain what she means by that and she tells me that I couldn’t possibly understand, because I’m not on the same spiritual plane that she and Yoni are. She says the same thing about her sister, Beth, and about experts like Daniel Bauer who question Yoni’s teachings. “I actually feel sorry for you,” she says. “You would be so much happier if you were here with us. You would not be concerned about having an answer for every little thing.”
Sagebrush County sheriff Matt Lewis will not comment on Lo’s assertions. But someone from the sheriff’s office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about Ethan Powell’s or Amaya Walters’s cases, said that the police believe what Lo says to be close to the truth. “We find her very credible. We just can’t prove any of it.”
I ask Lewis about Dana Powell. “It’s strange,” he admits. “At the request of her family, we went over to the Homestead to ask her a few questions. She swears that she is there of her own volition, that she was not coerced, and that she is free to leave at any time. She’s a grown woman who is legally of sound mind. Unless her family wants to try to get a court order to commit her, there’s nothing we can do.” Beth Morrison says her family is still considering their legal options.
Lo says she will never forgive herself for what happened to Dana. But she has found some happiness away from Yoni. She lives with the ex-follower who helped her adjust to twenty-first-century life. “I feel like I’ve been given a second chance at this mortal coil. I’m not going to mess this one up. I’m not sure how much time I have left.”
Dana has also found love. At the end of our conversation, I notice a simple gold band around her left ring finger. I ask her about it and she blushes. “If you must know, I’ve entered a spiritual marriage with Yoni. It’s the closest bond I’ve ever known. Our souls are united in a constant embrace.” I’m about to ask her a follow-up question when I hear a male voice in the background. “I’ve got to go,” Dana says. “Namaste.”
Acknowledgments
To Elisabeth Weed, who has been my supportive, brilliant agent since I was embarrassingly young and green. She saw something in me before I saw anything in myself. Her sharp eye and literary (and life) advice have kept me afloat for more than a decade.
To Kate Nintzel, my ace editor, who took the first draft of Soulmates and made it into a far, far better book than I thought it could possibly be. I am so grateful to have found someone who understands my voice so thoroughly. And to Kate Schafer and Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, whose expertise and help with this book have been indispensable.
To all the colleagues and friends who read early drafts and weighed in, particularly Ann Bauer, who read the first chapter and convinced me it could be a decent book; Hanna Rosin, who did the same; Leah Chernikoff, who provided ongoing Gchat support; and Jason Zinoman, who read the second (or maybe the third?) full version and gave me the confidence I needed to push through the last rounds of edits. To Anne-Marie Slaughter for showing me, by example, that having young children isn’t a roadblock to finishing a second novel.
To David Plotz, Noreen Malone, Willa Paskin, Ben Cooley, Jessica Pressler, Emily Gould, Elissa Strauss, Colby Bird, Tatiana Homonoff, Anna Knoell, Thornton McEnery and Kristen Crofoot for providing many things, including but not limited to: literary advice, local entertainment, and occasional toddler wrangling.
To Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who have been incredible boss ladies at Lenny and have given me the opportunity of a lifetime. I never thought I would go back to a staff job after freelancing for years, but I never imagined the feminist utopia they created was possible. Their work ethic is an ongoing inspiration. To Laia Garcia, who has been an amazing partner in running Lenny and makes me laugh every damn day.
To my parents, Richard and Judith Grose, for encouraging my creativity ever since I wrote a satirical play at age ten about Henry VIII and his six wives called Ouch! To my brother, Jacob Grose, and my sister-in-law, Anna Magracheva; and to my in-laws, David, Charlotte, Wendell, and Judson Winton, Meghan Best and Noah Pritzker, for their love and support.
And finally, to Michael Winton, my life and my heart. Thank you for doing long weekends of child care without complaint so I could work on this book, and for being such a true partner. Our daughters are as lucky to have you as a father as I am to have you as a husband.
About the Author
JESSICA GROSE is a writer and editor. She was previously a senior editor at Slate and an editor at Jezebel. She is currently editor in chief of the email newsletter Lenny. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, Marie Claire, Spin, and on Salon, among many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughters.
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Sad Desk Salad
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SOULMATES. Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Grose. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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