This is an audio transcript of the The Retreat: Episode 1, Dear Madison
Madison Marriage
This series discusses suicide and mental health. Please take care while listening and seek support if you need it.
In January of 2023, I was sitting at my desk at the Financial Times when an email popped into my inbox. The subject line immediately caught my eye. It read: “Meditation cults and mental health”.
My name is Madison Marriage, and over a year ago, I took on a new role running a special investigations unit for the Financial Times. Our goal is to expose abuse of power — institutional failings in any field; business, education, politics, you name it. Our publication normally covers financial journalism, so meditation cults are not the kind of thing I usually write about. But there was something about the author’s tone that made me sit up and pay attention. ‘Dear Madison,’ he started.
Stephen
Media coverage of meditation is almost universally positive, yet there is strong evidence that it can cause serious mental health issues, especially in the young people who are drawn to it in a search for some form of spirituality. My interest in this is due to the terrifying damage done to the lives of my twin daughters, now aged 27, over the last five years, due to their involvement with the Vipassana organisation. They are now recovering, but still fragile. Nonetheless they would be prepared to share their stories. Happy to chat whenever.
Madison Marriage
I knew next to nothing about meditation and had never even heard the word Vipassana before. I don’t meditate. I’ve known people who meditate, just as I’m sure many people have. But still, that would hardly qualify me as an expert. But Stephen’s email sounded articulate. It felt genuine. I felt concern for his daughters when I read it. I know lots of people who have experienced mental health challenges. Depression, anxiety and addiction are not unusual among my peers. And many people I know are trying alternative methods to feel better. So even though I didn’t understand exactly what Stephen and his daughters were going through, their claims seemed relevant. So I replied cautiously. I asked for more information. And then I began to research the organisation Stephen referred to . . . something to do with the word ‘Goenka’. The focus of this group is a specific type of meditation called Vipassana. It offers 10-day silent meditation retreats, to participants all over the world. You’re going to hear those two words pretty interchangeably: Goenka and Vipassana. Goenka is the name of the man who founded this network of retreats, a kind of guru at the heart of the network. And Vipassana is the meditation technique he adopted. You hear Goenka’s voice at every retreat.
Goenka
This technique will help you. To explore the truth of the entire field of matter.
Madison Marriage
Goenka’s method involves systematically scanning your body from your head to your feet over and over, observing the sensations you come across.
Goenka
Body sensation is so important, and as you proceed on the body, it will become clearer and clearer.
Madison Marriage
As soon as I started researching it, I saw how popular Goenka retreats are.
[MONTAGE VOICE CLIP]
So I just recently came back from the Vipassana meditation retreat. Ten-day Vipassana course, we can’t speak or make eye contact with anyone.
Madison Marriage
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey raves about Goenka retreats. Thousands of people go on them every year. Getting off the waitlist for one of these retreats is a bit like getting Glastonbury tickets. People love them, and they’re fanatical about their experiences online.
[YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP]
Guys, it is all true what all of these people say about these Vipassana courses
[YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP]
I’ve always go as far to say it’s almost the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life.
[YOUTUBER VOICE CLIP]
I would recommend a retreat to anyone, even if it’s just to see what you’re made of.
Madison Marriage
Goenka meditation centres are everywhere, from Scandinavia to Latin America, central Europe, to far flung corners of south-east Asia. People within the meditation worlds all seem to have heard of it. It’s respected, maybe even revered. Goenka’s technique supposedly allows for the “total eradication of mental impurities and the highest happiness of full liberation”. When I scroll down a bit further on the results of my Google search, there were a handful of articles that detailed personal experiences at Goenka retreats. Some of them read like horror stories. There’s a rabbit hole of Reddit threads where people detail physical pain and psychological breaks. People referred to the retreats as being like a voluntary prison sentence and accused the teachers running them of exhibiting irresponsible behaviour, bordering on malpractice. Before long, I was corresponding with the author of the email I had received a few days earlier. His name is Stephen. He’s the one who urged me to look into this group in the first place. From the start, he was not shy about voicing his opinions on the Goenka organisation.
Stephen
The organisation is based on a false premise, which is that ultimately intensive meditation can help people and maybe it does help some people. But it’s like a very strong drug. And it has side effects.
Madison Marriage
Stephen was adamant that the meditation group his daughters had become involved with was dangerous — that it warranted scrutiny from me and from the authorities. The Goenka organisation is registered as a charity in many of the countries it operates in and it’s pulled in substantial government grants. He felt the whole set-up should be questioned.
Stephen
Because we don’t understand the human mind. People like this are selling what in my mind amounts to quack cures to vulnerable young people, including my daughters.
Madison Marriage
Frankly, initially I was sceptical. Stephen said his twin daughters had become a shell of the people they once were. That they were fragile. That they were in recovery. I kept thinking — recovery from what, exactly? How could a meditation organisation that promises spiritual bliss end up causing such in Stephen’s words, terrifying damage? Was he right? Did this organisation bear any resemblance to a cult? This was the starting point on a 12-month journey, attempting to understand the world of one organisation. A world that advertises self-improvement and spiritual awakenings — and allegedly has caused real psychological and physical harm. It’s a journey unlike any other story I’ve worked on before. From the Special Investigations Team at the Financial Times, this is: The Retreat.
[FORMER RETREAT PARTICIPANT VOICE CLIP]
The retreat. I went into what I would consider a psychotic break.
[FORMER RETREAT PARTICIPANT VOICE CLIP]
It was like being in a torture chamber for my mind for six months.
Goenka
The final goal is to purify the mind.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Madison Marriage
Episode One: Dear Madison.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Stephen told me his twin daughters had experienced serious mental health episodes after getting drawn into Goenka retreats. But I struggled to understand why and how. So I set off on the train from Paddington in central London to meet the family.
[BACKGROUND VOICES]
Hello, hello, nice to meet you. So how are you?
Madison Marriage
The twins don’t want to be named for many reasons. So we’re using pseudonyms. Sarah and Emily. Emily was the first of the twin sisters to discover Goenka. When I met her, she was lodging with her boyfriend and a woman in her fifties who was a vicar at a nearby church. Emily told me the vicar had agreed to take the couple in after learning about her difficulties. She tried to live with roommates her own age, but she found it too difficult living in a lively house share with other 20-somethings. Her nervous system was different now, she said, and extremely sensitive.
Emily
To different things. But I have to be careful about it. I can’t go out partying, like if I push myself too hard I feel that immediately and then I have to take, I just like everything gets fried and I just have to stop and I have to let go and garden for a couple of days, just to like, feel okay again. So it’s like — I have to go very easy.
Madison Marriage
Emily is tall and slim with kind friendly eyes and a bookish look about her. She’s outgoing and gregarious and seems at ease with herself. She comes across as warm and generous.
So just tell me a little bit about your childhood?
Emily
You know, I was very lucky to grow up with a lot of material comfort. And yeah, I went to really good schools and had lots of opportunities with lots of music.
Madison Marriage
I wanted to know whether there were any underlying issues in the family that led to the twins spiral. Did they have any conditions they could point to or past trauma that might make them particularly susceptible to severe mental health problems?
Emily
Yeah, I like definitely found teenage years pretty rough. Like, I was happy sometimes and sometimes I felt lonely and excluded.
Madison Marriage
But Emily said the house was overall a happy one growing up. That outside of the usual squabbling between the siblings or the occasional fallouts with their parents, they didn’t have significant problems. In fact, there was kind of an idyllic quality to their lives, as Emily tells it. They come from a very musical family. Their mum is a music teacher and pianist. Their dad, Stephen, works in finance, but at home he’s also quite musical. He started playing the trumpet when he turned 50, and he sings.
Emily
We go out walking a lot. We’d always go to cello classes. You have cello classes . . . we used to play and like, we always had nice gardens, so we’d always kind of play.
Madison Marriage
The twins and their brother were each given a cello at the age of four and weekends growing up, they spent their time playing in quartets as a family, singing together, going for walks in the countryside, cooking.
Emily
We’d have dinner together. Dad would always cook a Sunday dinner roast, and Mum and Dad were always really like strong together. And definitely cared about us a lot.
Madison Marriage
By the end of 2014, Emily’s future was looking bright. She’d been a straight-A student in school. But she still had fun. She worked a job on Saturdays and went to parties on the weekend, fretted about her love life and went on holidays with friends.
Emily
Like, I was pretty work hard, play hard. Like I’ll go out partying until 4:00 in the morning and then get up and do my weekend job and then go back to school and do my A-levels. But it was fun. Like I, I kind of thrived off that, I think.
Madison Marriage
When she was 18, Emily got a place to study French and Spanish at Oxford university. She was really excited for this chapter of her life to begin. But when she got to Oxford, she found it tough — tougher than she had expected.
Emily
I just really struggled through it when other people didn’t. I felt like I didn’t have time to kind of breathe. And, you know, I felt like it was just too much.
Madison Marriage
Emily decided to take a year out of her studies just to catch her breath. She could go back to Oxford the following year and in the meantime, she’d travel. Just before she set off, a friend gave her a book on mindfulness. This book was the first time she had come across the word ‘Vipassana’. She found the meditation principles in it exciting.
Emily
I remember reading, I’m like, this is what I’ve been looking for because this is like, all about finding peace inside and like coming out of mental complexes. And like, I was just really, like, fascinated by the whole thing.
Madison Marriage
As Emily backpacked with a group of strangers, she learned more about meditation and a particular retreat. A special 10-day silent meditation program founded by the spiritual leader Satya Narayana Goenka, in the 1970s. Goenka was a businessman from Burma who got into meditation in his thirties to help with intense migraines. He really took to the practice to the point where he gave up his business to move to India and teach meditation full time.
Goenka
Let people believe in this corner that corner, this philosophy that philosophy, don’t worry, but don’t forget the essence.
Madison Marriage
Over time, he began teaching this method to individuals all over the world. He went on to establish a global network of over 240 Vipassana centres and an intense and rigid method of his own.
Goenka
Ten days people had to spare. It looks too much, oh 10 days how can I give 10 days? But once you pass through it, you find these were the best days of my life.
Madison Marriage
One of the most unusual things about this organisation is that all of these courses are completely free. This helps drive their popularity, and the whole Goenka network depends on donations and volunteer work. Goenka passed away in 2013, but recordings of his voice still boom across Vipassana meditation halls around the world today, and his meditation system, a rigid timetable that starts at 4am and finishes at 9:30pm, remains identical in every country his organisation operates in. It’s hardcore. Some people call it the marines of meditation. Emily actually signed up to a Goenka retreat while she was traveling in India, but she had second thoughts after realising the course structure sounded pretty intense.
Emily
I was like, no, that sounds a bit full on. I’ll do that later on in life. So I went into like other stuff and like, just have fun. I just travelled loads and like, had a traveling romance and, you know, just like, forgot about Oxford and how stressful it was.
Madison Marriage
But Emily did learn a lot about meditating while she was travelling, and she started to meditate from time to time after she returned to Oxford in early 2016. That summer, Emily signed up to her first Goenka retreat at a centre close to her parents’ home in Herefordshire. This time, she felt ready. She wanted to continue to better herself, to keep finding ways to cope with stress.
Emily
I did not know that it might be risky. Absolutely no thought of that at all.
Madison Marriage
The retreat centre in Herefordshire is called Dhamma Dipa, and it’s in an old remote farmhouse. The setting was tranquil, but isolated.
Emily
Dhamma Dipa is very lovely, very pretty. And I stayed in like an old farmhouse, in a shed room with one other lady, which is very simple. I had that sense when I arrived, like, oh, this is such a nice, lovely, you know, lovely environment. I felt like I associated meditation retreats with like safety and nourishment and, like, good food and like, lots of sleep, lots of time to like feel, wow. That just wasn’t really that experience.
Madison Marriage
Emily soon realised that the intensity of this retreat was unlike anything she had ever experienced. On the first day, she was given a warning.
Emily
And the first night they kind of tell you, you should surrender to the whole process. They say it’s like an operation of your mind, to make your mind healthy.
Madison Marriage
It’s like a medical procedure, they told her, and you mustn’t leave in the middle of it.
Emily
Because if you leave in the middle of it, it’s dangerous. It’s like leaving during an operation which is in the process of happening when you’re cut open . . .
[SOUND OF A BELL]
Madison Marriage
Over the next 10 days, silence would be mandatory as she embarked on a gruelling meditation regime starting at 4am. She had to meditate for what felt like all day, every day. And it physically hurt.
Emily
And so I’d be fine for a bit, because I was used to doing like a bit meditation. I found that calming. But then it was like just . . . having to carry on.
Madison Marriage
Emily wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be feeling so unpleasant. She wanted to leave at one point, but the teachings during the retreats encouraged her to keep going. So she did.
Emily
They say in the teachings like your mind is full of impurities and like you’ve become a slave to all your impurities. I need to learn to control your mind. Those kind of things like I should do this, I must do this, I’m a bad person if I can’t do it.
Madison Marriage
Emily stayed through 10 days of meditating for 10 hours a day in silence and with no communication with the outside world. The hardest thing for her was that she stopped being able to sleep.
Emily
I couldn’t sleep at all.
Madison Marriage
From day one?
Emily
Yeah, from day one.
Madison Marriage
Emily says that she never had sleep issues before this retreats. Aside from a couple of restless nights ahead of a big exam.
Emily
I just thought it was my fault. And it was because in my mind, I wasn’t able to sleep.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Madison Marriage
Some aspects of the retreats were positive — exciting, even. Emily began to have almost transcendental experiences.
Emily
There’ll be moments which felt really good. I felt like this is what I’ve been looking for, like feeling a sense of connection to everything in life. It’s a state of mind that was like very above every day. Like massive rushes of serotonin would definitely happen at certain points.
Madison Marriage
On the 10th day, the meditators could finally talk to each other and compare experiences. Many seem to have reached some kind of higher plane. Supposedly, if you’ve applied the technique correctly, you are meant to feel a harmonious flow through your body. But Emily hadn’t quite gotten there. The overachiever in her felt like she’d missed the mark.
Emily
I just felt like I’d failed. I felt like I hadn’t got it right or I hadn’t, there was something that I hadn’t experienced, like everyone was talking about. Like this will happen. That will happen. I was like — I can’t even do it. I can’t even, I can’t even feel my body as a whole, as everyone’s saying I should do.
Madison Marriage
She thought, maybe she just wasn’t that good at this. Maybe she needed to work harder.
Emily
So I felt like, okay, I need to come back. Try again. That was how I felt. I felt like I just failed. I felt pretty cut open.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Madison Marriage
More after the break.
Emily left the retreat, feeling a little downcast, but determined to do another Goenka retreat soon and get it right. She also had a slight buzz. The trippier moments during the retreats carried over and helped her feel calm as she headed off to study overseas. The sleeplessness aside, she felt it had done her some good. While she was abroad, Emily found herself with time on her hands, so she signed up to work as a volunteer at a Goenka retreat. Even though she had only been through a single retreat she was deemed qualified to work as a volunteer. Volunteers at the retreats are called servers, an unpaid position but your board and lodging is free. You do less meditation — around four hours a day — and otherwise help out around the venue, preparing meals, cleaning toilets, making beds, and socialising with the other servers. Emily’s serving experience during the first retreat was okay, but then she signed up to be a server for a second retreat, and that retreat was different, horribly different.
Emily
It really started to fuck me up, so I’d stopped sleeping. So I’d have major emotional, like big, big emotional reactions to things. And then I would have like lucid dreams. I was like, I was like a fish swimming through the ocean and like almost hallucinatory dreams and stuff like that, which I never had before. But the whole narrative that was like, Oh, it’s good, you know, that’s what we’re here for over here. It’s like, get all of our stuff out of us. If you’re feeling anxious or upset or anguished or whatever, you know, it’s part of the process.
Madison Marriage
Emily told me the retreat she volunteered at did something to her mind, something she could not reverse. It set in process a chain of events that completely overturned the next five years of her life. Her next few months were tough. She was supposed to be studying abroad, but she couldn’t focus or think rationally. She moved several times. Eventually, she dropped the university course and started hitchhiking on her travels, oblivious to any personal safety risks. She was meditating for several hours a day. This is what the Goenka course recommended Emily should do after the retreats. Keep up the program. Keep meditating. Emily followed the recommendations diligently. Sometimes she sat with her eyes closed on the side of the road, meditating while waiting for a ride. Other times she meditated while sitting in the back of a stranger’s car.
Emily
My brain was like, falling apart and I wasn’t sleeping, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on.I was kind of, like, slightly tripping the whole time. In that my state of consciousness was very like, being forcefully elevated.
Madison Marriage
She finally returned to the UK in mid-2017, a total wreck.
Kate
When she came back, she was clearly very unwell. She wasn’t sleeping.
Madison Marriage
This is Emily’s mum, Kate, describing her daughter when she first returned home.
Kate
She was stick thin. And she looked ashen. I was frightened. I tried to get her to see the doctor and she wouldn’t. She just looked, almost like an old woman. You know, she’d lost all the bloom in her cheeks. She just looked grey. And not herself. She just looked like a bag of bones.
Madison Marriage
I went to meet Emily’s mum, Kate, and her dad, Stephen, the one who sent me the email at their home in Herefordshire, not long after I met Emily. Kate’s a lovely lady. She came to pick me up from the train station and drove me to their farmhouse, which overlooks a field of sheep. This is the house Emily returned to from her studies abroad. Kate and Stephen told me how shocking her return was. This is Stephen, Emily’s dad.
Stephen
She didn’t seem happy. She came across as not there. And obviously on one level, she was there physically and she could talk. But it was as if her personality had been removed.
Madison Marriage
Emily says when she returned, she felt awful all the time, every day.
Emily
So dreadful. I was still kind of like tripping. I felt like I just been split in half.
Madison Marriage
She didn’t know what was wrong with her, so she signed up to do another retreat. The only thing that seemed to provide her with any relief from what she describes as a dreadful day to day experience. Her parents at this point were supportive of her going on the retreats and meditating at home. Stephen thought that meditation was perhaps a remedy for the insomnia and detachment his daughter was displaying.
Emily
He thought that I was mentally ill and the meditation would help, which was my general narrative as well.
Madison Marriage
But Emily says she didn’t have any mental health issues before she started meditating.
In autumn 2017, a little over a year since her first Goenka retreat, Emily returned to Oxford to start what should have been her final academic year. But it was hell. She became hypersensitive to noise, sickened by food and suffered from extreme sleeplessness and irritability.
Emily
Any sensory input, I’d go like, torturous, it was like being tortured every day and every night nonstop. I felt like I didn’t even exist anymore. I felt like there was just no one. It was like I was like an empty body.
Madison Marriage
Somehow she got through the academic term, but by the time she came home for Christmas, she seemed to have entered a psychotic state.
Kate
She wasn’t like a normal human being. She was like a ghost. She was expressionless. She had nothing to say. She did nothing except sit in her room and meditate or go out wandering around the fields any time of day or night. Face like a thundercloud.
Madison Marriage
And then there were bouts of mania.
Kate
Sometimes she would come and talk to me and there’d be a strange look in her eyes, a kind of mistiness and a kind of faraway look in her eyes. I remember her saying to me: ‘Mum, I am the Messiah. I’m going to save the world’. She said, I’m going through the dark night of the soul. And I said, What’s that? She said, don’t you know what the dark night of the soul is?Everyone goes through this. But I’m the Messiah and I’m going to save the world.
Madison Marriage
After several weeks of watching Emily get worse and worse, she started looking through Emily’s diaries. That’s where she found some things Emily wrote. About taking her own life.
Kate
I found her journal, where she talks about contemplating suicide.
Madison Marriage
And she didn’t see a doctor throughout this period?
Kate
No, she wouldn’t. And she was an adult, and I couldn’t make her.
Madison Marriage
For Kate, the change in her daughter was difficult to reconcile. Emily had gone from being an outgoing grade-A student at one of the best universities in the world to dropping out of university and withdrawing from society. She had become practically unrecognisable since her first Goenka retreat 18 months earlier. Kate knew she had to take action. By now she suspected that the meditation might be doing her daughter harm rather than helping. And she started digging around on the internet for information about the Goenka organisation and Vipassana meditation. She learned that there were centres all over the world where 10-day retreats were held and that the retreats were all based on the teachings of this one man. Eventually, she found blog posts suggesting the whole Goenka network was like a cult.
Kate
And that it was pulling the wool over people’s eyes, that what they were offering was some sort of bogus pseudo-religious experience, but that they were essentially cultists.
Madison Marriage
This is when Kate started to seriously panic. She told Stephen, her husband, that she thought their daughter might be in a meditation cult.
Stephen
Kate started reading books about cults and how they operate and giving them to me and saying, look, you’ve got to read this. And that actually caused various forms of scales to fall from my eyes.
Madison Marriage
Terrified, Kate and Stephen started to look for ways to help get their daughter away from this organisation. And Kate came across a group called the Cult Information Centre.
Kate
And I phoned them up and started describing to them what was happening to my daughter. And they said this state of psychosis can be brought on by meditation and you need to get a very specialist help.
Madison Marriage
Kate didn’t even know how to go about finding a specialist for this sort of thing. It’s like looking up a Ghostbuster. You don’t even know you need one, until you do. The centre made some recommendations, and that’s how she found Graham Baldwin.
Graham Baldwin
Groups work to try and stop people thinking for themselves. And so our job is to rekindle those critical abilities.
Madison Marriage
Graham’s the director of Catalyst, which is a charity that helps families and individuals that have been damaged by abusive relationships and groups. He remembers the call he got from Kate.
Graham Baldwin
She described the way her daughter was behaving. She was cutting herself off, sitting in a room all the time, unable to sleep. Having paranoid episodes and, you know, the usual sort of signs of a psychiatric breakdown.
Madison Marriage
Graham’s worked with lots of families who have made calls to him just like this one. Families who think their loved one has become involved in a cult. But Graham thought the important issue was less about whether Emily was involved in a cult and more about the fact she was involved with such intensive meditation. He told me about the first time he heard of people having difficulties from meditation. It was back in the nineties and he had been asked to go to India to try and track someone down who’d become involved in a cult there.
Graham Baldwin
So I decided to talk to people locally and I went to a local psychiatric hospital. The doctor said to me, I’m glad you called, because the problem we have here is something that we termed the English disease. I said the English disease? What’s the English disease? And he said, it’s people that have psychiatric breakdowns because they got involved with meditation groups in India. And so these people come over here, they get involved in a meditation group, they do excessive meditation, and then they have breakdowns.
Madison Marriage
So when Graham heard about Emily, he wasn’t surprised. This wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to help someone who’d been intensely practicing Vipassana meditation and fallen into difficulty.
Graham Baldwin
And this is a problem with some meditation groups and groups like Vipassana, which presented meditation as the solution to everything. Yeah, it will help you to become a better person and etc etc.
Madison Marriage
Graham says from his own personal experience, not everyone becomes a better person from intensive meditation.
Graham Baldwin
About a third of the people that do meditation, it works. And they feel that it does make them feel better. About a third say it doesn’t do any good one way or the other, and it’s useless and people stop doing it. And another third develop problems as a result of the meditation.
Madison Marriage
I was taken aback by what Graham was saying –that effectively it was well known that intensive meditation could harm people. And Graham says there’s often a reluctance for meditation groups to accept the meditation is just not good for some people. Even bad for them, like it was for Emily.
Graham Baldwin
Now, what’s interesting about that is that when the groups see this problem, of people having, you know, psychiatric breakdowns, they claim that it’s just sort of clearing out the rubbish in the pipes. You know, it’s something people have to continue doing and get over it. And in my experience, all it ever does is make the person worse. And the biggest thing in putting them back together was getting them to stop meditating, which is quite difficult when they’ve been told it was the only answer to their problems.
Madison Marriage
Graham told Kate and Stephen that it sounded like their daughter was in a state of psychosis from too much meditation. They needed to get her to stop meditating right away, but this would not be easy and they needed to tread lightly. Kate created a plan to try to convince Emily to get on a call with Graham.
Kate
I said, somebody on the phone wants to talk to you. He’s very interested in your experience with Vipassana. Would you talk to him? And amazingly, she agreed. And so she spent, I don’t know, like two hours talking to him on the phone. And afterwards she was completely exhausted. And we went on like this for four or five weeks, planning phone calls where she would talk to him. And by the end of about, she must have had five or six long sessions of conversation with this man, she started doing things like picking up the Sunday papers, commenting on an article, listening to something that was said on the radio and responding to it, having a conversation with us. She started basically coming back into touch with reality. And that was the beginning of her recovery.
Madison Marriage
Graham’s intervention seemed to work, but the progress Graham made didn’t reverse things back to normal. Emily was still on a very different trajectory to two years earlier. She had dropped out of Oxford, was living at home and still wasn’t able to function in society. But at least she no longer seemed suicidal or completely detached from reality. Kate and Stephen thought they were beginning to get their daughter back, that things were about to improve. But then something else happened. Unbelievably, Emily’s twin sister, Sarah, started to get into meditation as well. Ultimately becoming hooked on the same form of Vipassana meditation taught by Goenka. Sarah had seen her sister meditating as a way to feel better, so she thought she’d try it too.
Emily
I do feel a sense of responsibility and a great, great deal of guilt and shame and embarrassment and like horror because of the way that I encouraged her to go to do Vipassana. But I also can see that I was only acting on the information that I had available to my conscious kind of self at that time.
Madison Marriage
Sarah went to her first retreat, then another, then another. Soon, Sarah started to exhibit the same behaviour as Emily had, only more severe. She was being plagued by memories of rape, war and murder. Events that had never happened to her. Kate now had two daughters in serious psychological distress. And the common variable was the Goenka retreats.
Kate
It was horrific. She was hallucinating some of the time. I remember her crying. She’s going. I’m losing her. She’s gone.
Madison Marriage
I needed to understand what happened to Sarah and whether these frightening experiences were unique to the twins. Were there others who’d had this experience, too? Just how widespread were these issues? That’s in the next episode of The Retreat.
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The Retreat is the first season from Untold, a new Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced by the Financial Times with Goat Rodeo. The series lead producers are Rebecca Seidel and Persis Love. Reporting by me, Madison Marriage. Writing by me, Megan Nodolski and Rebecca Seidel. Story editing from Ian Enright. Executive producers for the Financial Times are Topher Forhecz and Cheryl Brumley. Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nodolski. Mixing, editing and sound design by Rebecca Seidel. The series theme is Everyone Alive Wants Answers by Colleen. Additional music from Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions. Editorial and production assistance from Paul Aflalo, Joshua Gabert-Doyon, Petros Gioumpasis, Andrew Georgiades, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Laura Clarke. Thanks also to Alastair Mackie.
If you’ve been affected by anything in this series, there are some useful resources highlighted in the show notes. And if you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch with me, Madison, at madison.marriage@ft.com. If you’re an FT subscriber and don’t want to wait to hear the remaining three episodes of the series, log on now to FT.com or find in our FT app a new playlist feature where you can binge the entire season. You can find a link in our show you notes. Thanks to you for listening and thanks to the many sources who shared their very personal stories with me.
