The Other Side of Enlightenment

As his plane cruised high above the cloud floor obscuring the vast Pacific below, Steve Hassan felt a familiar anxiety. He’d been doing interventions for going on 30 years—he once pulled a woman out of Aum Shinrikyo after it launched its 1995 sarin gas attack in the subways of Tokyo, and another time talked a suicidal ex–Heaven’s Gate member out of following in the footsteps of his Nike-clad counterparts—but they still always made him jumpy. Plus, he wasn’t partial to emergency jobs. And for this case, which was taking the cult expert from Boston all the way to Hawaii, he’d have very little time to assess his subject, who was in the clutches of what Hassan believed to be an especially dangerous group.

It was December 2004, and just a few weeks since Charles Laquidara, the former WBCN and WZLX radio star, had called Hassan’s Somerville office in a panic. Phoning from his home on Maui, Laquidara said his son, Ari, had become heavily involved with the Newton Centre branch of a group called Dahn Yoga and Healing. After joining Dahn, Ari had suddenly abandoned his plans to pursue graduate studies in California. He’d stopped calling home regularly. He wasn’t eating or sleeping enough. And Laquidara was convinced Dahn was behind it all.

Hassan was not particularly surprised by what he was hearing. He’d been onto Dahn for several years by then, and in his view the group had the qualities of a destructive cult: an authoritarian structure, a shifting organizational identity, deceptive recruitment techniques, and systematic sleep deprivation. Equally troubling to Hassan, Dahn appeared to be growing, expanding from its first U.S. studio in Philadelphia to locations nationwide, 11 of them in the Boston area.

With the jet engines humming in the background, his lanky frame folded into the seat, Hassan went over his plan. Ari would be spending Christmas at his parents’ home, a rare, and crucial, period of uninterrupted time away from the Dahn community. Hassan would arrive two days ahead of him, and use that limited window to determine whether action was warranted. (As with all his clients, he’d told the Laquidaras there was no guarantee he’d go forward with an intervention.) If the situation was indeed as bad as Ari’s parents were making it seem, he’d then have to work around the clock to prep the family and friends the Laquidaras were flying in to lend a hand. Because of the great distance involved, Hassan wouldn’t be able to bring in ex–Dahn members to tell Ari their stories in person, as he usually did, and would have to rely on video conferencing and phone calls instead. Worse, he’d be getting Ari fresh off a 10-day course at Dahn’s main U.S. meditation center in the New Age mecca of Sedona, Arizona. Hassan had been in the business long enough to know that Ari would be high as a kite on Dahn when he touched down on the island.

It was far from an optimal way to work, but under the circumstances, he really didn’t have a choice. The way Charles Laquidara was making it sound, if Hassan didn’t get to the family’s bluff-top home immediately, there might not be another chance to save Ari. It was now or never, he told him.