In 1941, the British secretly mounted a military coup d’état against my grandfather and his government, and he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator—the furthest thing from the truth. Prince Paul was forced to abdicate at gunpoint, and the royal family had four hours to leave the country or be shot to death. They rushed to the train station, made their way to Greece, where they were denied entry, were then flown to Cairo, and eventually ended up in Kenya, under British house arrest. My mother was four years old at the time and remembers this moment like it was yesterday.
Her family was declared enemies of the state by the Communist regime in 1947, and her father was vilified as a traitor and a war criminal for trying to save his country from the war.
Since then, my mother had worked hard to clear his name and reinstate his legacy. In 1989, she uncovered the British plot after going to the head of the Special Operations Executive, a branch of the British Secret Service, and convincing him to give her classified documents. It didn’t hurt that my mother was glamorous and alluring, and that the real-life James Bond type had a mad crush on her.
In 2012, thirty-six years after he died at the age of eighty-three, my grandfather Prince Paul was finally vindicated as a national hero and the true humanist that he was. I was with my mother when his coffin was lifted precariously out of his grave in a cemetery in Lausanne, Switzerland, and brought home to Serbia for an official hero’s burial.
Mom currently lives in Belgrade, where she was a recent Serbian presidential candidate, and spends her days working as a human rights activist, much like her father.
—
IN OTHER WORDS, my mother was intelligent, beautiful, educated, regal, worldly, and came from a long line of fierce, brave fighters for independence and justice—as well as being one herself. There was no way someone like her would put up with Nancy’s bullshit ideas that would drag women—especially the women in her family—back to the dark ages.
As Nancy continued to talk, making derogatory remarks about women behaving like “princesses,” my mother started yawning and shuffling around things, causing a minor disturbance. She was bred only partially in Britain, and her troublemaking Slavic side trumped ladylike etiquette when the occasion demanded.
Later, after all the women had left for the day, she was more vocal.
“What utter rubbish!” she said as she, India, and I gathered in the kitchen to make dinner. My mother’s breakout group that day had been assigned Nancy as their coach, and she was describing to us with great pleasure how she’d launched a private revolt against Nancy’s oppressive regime.
“I spent the whole day answering her as stupidly as possible,” she said. “I gave Nancy the most inane answers I could think of, just to annoy her on purpose. Whatever she said to me, I answered the opposite. The whole thing was boring, and that Nancy was . . . colorless.”
As Mom spoke, India was quiet. I could see she was uncomfortable to hear her grandmother mock Prefect. By this time, she’d finished the second segment of Level One and had signed up for the third.
“What did you think of the class today, India?” I asked.
She shrugged. I knew that meant she wasn’t crazy about it. When she likes something, she says so, and the same for when she doesn’t. Although she was the sweet peacekeeper of the family (just like her great-grandfather), India had also inherited our family’s fierce DNA, and like my mother and me, there was no way she would have agreed with anything Nancy said in our living room that day. But as outspoken as my mother was that night, my daughter was the opposite.
Looking back, I’d pinpoint this as one of the first moments when India may have been following ESP’s commandment: loyalty to the group above all else, even above your family.
Like my mother, I had a lot to say about what we’d heard that day, but I was too shaken up to know where to begin. It was the first time I’d seen blatant, overt signs of misogyny in an ESP-related course, and it more than unsettled me—it disturbed me deeply.
I tried to shrug it off, like India, hoping that Jness was some weird aberration from the regular program. I’d already paid for the entire course and was two-thirds of the way through, so it made no sense not to finish just because of one bad weekend, I told myself. I hadn’t seen any other evidence of sexism from the people or with the curriculum thus far. For now, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt—but I would stay on high alert for more warning signs.
Maybe the ugly things I’d heard at Jness would be wiped away by the magnificence that the coaches kept promising me, over and over, was still to come.
“Just wait until you reach the Magnificence Series!” they would say. “It happens on the last segment of Level One. All the diligent work you’ve been doing will come together in the end, and you will truly integrate and get to pay yourself tribute!”
Tribute? Us? Here was something new. Because the only people receiving tribute so far—again and again and again, ad nauseam—had been the mighty Vanguard and his sidekick, Gold Sash. But now, after fifteen days of crying, fake bowing, vomiting out my secrets, and lip-synching the mission statement, I would finally be worthy of some tribute of my own? Well, it was about time, damn it.
I went to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the final five days, and my husband trailed along dutifully. Poor Casper. I’d dragged him to so many seminars, workshops, lectures, and therapies throughout our marriage that somewhere along the way, he realized it was pointless to fight me.
One time, after we returned home from a month of ashram hopping in India, he said to me, “I can just imagine how horrendous and impossible you’d be to live with if you went off and got enlightened by yourself somewhere while I was fighting vampires on a film set.”
In Vancouver, I booked us a luxurious room at the Four Seasons so that we’d have a bit of a romantic getaway, and for the next five days, Casper and I immersed ourselves in moduling and EM-ing.
The coach in charge was orange-sash-wearer Wendy, who started us off with “Relationship Day,” and it was freaking depressing. All she and the other coaches talked about was how emotional attachment was an expression of weakness. Wendy said she would find it impossible to be married to someone who wasn’t in ESP. I looked at Casper. Would we be doomed if one of us decided this wasn’t for them?
The coaches didn’t mention the word “love” once; so much for putting the two of us in the mood for a romantic escape.
Casper really got into “Control Day”—it was like theater class and gave him a chance to flex his acting chops. We learned how to create different emotional states: excitement, power, high intensity, superenergized (think Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch). I had little doubt when he was doing his “power state”: I could hear his Tarzan cry from across the room, and who couldn’t? He had played the role of Tarzan in the 1998 film Tarzan and the Lost City, and reprised one of his chest-thumping, vine-swinging scenes for class, to the delight of all the women, I’m sure.
Casper was a good, obedient student—at least outwardly; I, on the other hand, had apparently acquired a reputation as “a tough nut to crack.” So much so, that they shipped a special handler from command central in Albany across the country to Vancouver to break me down.
It’s not that I hadn’t been opening myself up to the process and having dramatic breakthroughs, because I had—lots of them. I’d been existing on a steady and heady cocktail of tears and buzzing neurotransmitters each time I had a transformative moment in class. But now I was nearing the end of Level One, and they had to take quick action so that they wouldn’t lose me.
They were already losing my friend Katie. During one of her EMs this time around, Wendy’s feedback was that she was “forgettable.” She wasn’t happy about that.
I was a high-profile student and considered a “good catch.” My name and involvement had the potential to bring celebrities and dignitaries into the fold and help spread the good ESP word.
There was just one problem: I wasn’t compliant enough. I embraced the
emotional catharsis part of the program easily and willingly but was resistant when it came to bending to their will. I wasn’t toeing the line.
They obviously didn’t know that toeing the line to the will of others was not my family’s tradition.
So Esther—a tall, eagle-beaked witch of a woman—was dispatched and ordered to do whatever it took to break me down and make me a “sheeple.”
It was on Control Day, of all days, when a power struggle erupted, pitting me against Wendy and Esther.
Casper and I were never allowed to be in the same group together, just like India and I hadn’t been. So for once, I asked if I could watch Casper’s EM-ing that day. I’d regretted not being able to share more with India during class and hoped I could make up for that a little bit with my husband.
It was a way to be closer to him, and Casper had no problem with it. Wendy and Esther, though, came down on me hard for even asking.
“Why do you want to do that?” Esther demanded.
“Why are you more invested in your husband’s process than he is in yours?” accused Wendy.
“Your motives are fear based,” Esther said, “and you’re trying to control the process.”
We had two different agendas: mine was to get closer to my family, and theirs was to divide families and conquer them. I’m not sure I was aware yet of their motive, but I sure felt strongly about what I wanted and needed, and I wasn’t going to let them get in my way.
“Well, that’s your opinion,” I shot back, close to tears and ready to come to blows with them. “I don’t see it that way!”
The class watched silently, mouths agape, but I held my ground and got my way. They were going to have to find another way to string me along; trying to force me to be submissive wasn’t going to work.
Finally, Casper and I made it to the end of Level One and reached the much-anticipated Magnificence Series. Sort of. Day three came and went, and so did day four. Nothing. Near the end of the last day, Wendy told us it was time to pay tribute to ourselves.
“I want each group to come up with a one- or two-word description of each person’s essence,” she instructed. When it was my turn, I stood in the center of our little circle, and the students yelled words out at me:
“Lioness!” “Sparkly!” “Exquisite!” “Nurturer!” “Captivating!” “Ethereal!”
They finally decided on combining four of them: “Exquisite Nurturer” and “Sparkly Lioness”—the latter because I was fiercely maternal. (Ironically, they didn’t realize they were naming their own downfall.) Casper’s was “Playful Intensity.”
This was the great tribute I’d waited for? I had expected the heavens to part and the angels to sing, but it was not to be. Instead, it was like Affirmations 101.
By the end of the week, I was drained. The big tribute was a complete washout, and I’d spent so much time dismantling myself that I didn’t have any energy left to put myself back together. Enough was enough. It was time to say my goodbyes, get out of Dodge, and go back home to my life.
—
HOW I ENDED up enrolled in Level Two in that state of mind baffles me.
First came the persistent love bombing about what a stupendous job I’d done and what a shame it would be not to keep going. Then came the big push with the huge special discount they offered: $2,000 off if you booked in the next forty-eight hours!
When neither of those worked, they figured out one that did. I grumbled to Sarah Edmondson, the co-owner of the Vancouver center, that I hadn’t had the uplifting, transcendental finale I was expecting at the end of Level One, and a handful of them immediately swarmed around me.
“You weren’t ready yet,” one explained.
“You weren’t able to receive tribute because you don’t have enough of a foundation of self-love. There’s nowhere for that tribute to land,” insisted another.
“But Level Two begins with ‘Mobius,’ and it’s all about self-love!” piped in a third coach. “It’s exactly what you need, and then everything you’ve worked for and hoped for will all come together in one grand moment of enlightenment!”
The problem wasn’t the program, you see, it was me. I had yet another deficiency I needed to fix by taking another bullshit-sounding class. That’s the endless cycle they get you on.
This time the classes were almost double the price: $6,000 each. Never mind broken—these guys were going to make me broke. (Later, I would learn that the self-help business was an unregulated industry that generated up to eleven billion dollars per year.)
“Just get a new credit card and charge it!” the coaches told the class when they expressed shock at the significantly higher price moving forward. “Your personal growth should be your number one priority above everything else!”
Now they were playing the guilt card. And there was one more enticement, lest we forget: the Meet the Great One card.
“Level Two is in Albany,” they reminded us, “and Albany is where you will meet Vanguard.”
Oh, yeah.
Him.
4
* * *
THE GREAT OZ HAS SPOKEN
Casper and I landed in Albany in early January 2012, bundled up in parkas and boots for the wintry weather.
We were set to stay the week at Mark Vicente’s home in nearby Clifton Park. He was the filmmaker who’d done the pitching at the introductory meeting eight months earlier. Mark and his wife, Bonnie Piesse, lived just twenty minutes away from headquarters in a cookie-cutter townhouse on a pretty, leafy cul-de-sac.
That’s the thing about ESP: on the outside, it didn’t look anything like a cult you’ve read about or seen in the movies. There was no creepy compound behind a fence, which would have been a dead giveaway. The hundreds of Espians in Albany were spread out inconspicuously in the suburbs, embedded into real neighborhoods. It was great cult camouflage.
Bonnie and Mark were a sweet, fun, creative couple, and we liked them immediately. Tall, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, Mark gave off a very dignified presence. Bonnie was a blue-eyed, blonde beauty from Australia—a prettier Reese Witherspoon with a sweet, melodious singing voice. She’d been an actress for many years and had a recurring role in two Star Wars films but had recently given it up.
We didn’t see too much of them during the week because the schedule for Mobius was as grueling as the others, starting at eight in the morning and not ending until we got back to Mark and Bonnie’s by eleven at night. The best thing about Mobius was that we had graduated to live coaching—which meant no more cheesy videos of Nancy!
In class, we were each given a personal mentor, and, just my luck, who did I get?
She’s baaaaaack. I got Esther, the green-sashed enforcer who’d shadowed me in Vancouver. She was back for round two. This time she seemed intent on humiliating me in front of the entire class—obviously, one-on-one hadn’t done the trick the last time. Public shaming was a time-honored cult technique, and now she was resorting to extreme measures to crush my self-esteem.
“You feel entitled, don’t you?” she asked smugly, hovering over me in front of our small group as we began an EM-ing. “You’re used to getting whatever you want, huh? Aren’t you?”
She kept needling me, and I got more and more frustrated. This wasn’t just about breaking me down for a catharsis, this was about Esther staging a big sideshow to prove her dominance. And this time it was personal; she was out for revenge after our confrontation in Canada.
She wants drama? I’ll give her drama. I thought of Callum and his Oscar-winning performance in class the summer before, and I could almost hear a director shout “Action!”
I burst into tears, going into a ten-minute soliloquy and making up a bunch of shit about my traumatic, loveless, brutalized childhood to prove to her that I was the antithesis of entitled. I plagiarized an entire Dickensian youth—complete with the requisite begging bowl—just to get Esther to feel sorry for me and get her off my back.
And it worked. She fell for my Method 101 performance
hook, line, and sinker. So much so, in fact, that I think I saw a tear in her eye—the first authentic emotion I’d seen from a coach yet!
Over my convulsive sobs, she told the group how proud she was of me that I’d “pushed to penetrate through to my authentic self.”
Although it was wasted on Esther, that moment in class might have been one of my finest performances ever. I silently thanked actor Richard Burton, my very first acting coach, when I was thirteen, for saving me from Esther’s wrath. A longtime family friend and former fiancé of my mother’s, Richard taught me how to mesmerize an audience when coaching me in the role of the fairy Mustardseed in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school.
“You are way too shy to act,” he’d tell me, and then proceed to show me how to sob on cue. To this day, I often think of a line by the British historian and politician Lord Acton that he used to quote constantly, which made sense to me in class that day: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
—
IN AN EFFORT to advertise their noble, nonviolent, Gandhiesque lifestyle, everyone at headquarters was a strict vegetarian. The two of us were not, especially Casper—who was on one of his crazy bodybuilding diets and was timing his protein: four ounces every three hours. It was challenging enough to eat at restaurants with the others as they stared at us like we were a couple of bloodthirsty savages. But the long class hours, which messed up Casper’s workout schedule and special diet, meant that he had to try to sneak contraband meat into the communal fridge at the office.
When one of the coaches spotted his doggie bag of sirloin one day, it caused a small uproar. He paraded the offensive bag of flesh around the room until Casper fessed up to it. He was then escorted out of the building by a procession of coaches, like a funeral march, until he dropped the bag in a trash can across the street.
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