A Seeker Is Born Every Minute

This story is another installment in my Earth Indigenous Elder project, an attempt to tell my story from the beginning of time as an exercise in creating meaning. My premise is that we are homo narrans, the storytelling animal, and this is a story about healing places, retreats, and the people who create them. Other animals have special places where they go or gather that may be healing for them, but probably not because of any stories they tell. What seems remarkable now is that any homo narrans can transform any place into a sacred healing or transformative space at any time. It’s a business, and it’s booming. I’m trying to make sense of it in these four pages. Here goes!

My interest in healing retreats began about 20 years ago at the Dead Sea in Israel after running up the steep trail to the clifftop fortress of Masada, racing the gondola. I not only lost the race to the gondola, but I could barely walk around the spectacular fortress because my knee hurt so badly. Hours later, I limped straight out into the salty sea until my feet stopped touching the bottom, and I realized that I could actually walk on the dense salt water—albeit chest deep—and my knee felt better. Wow! Soon after, I was back on shore in a beachfront spa, where I was wrapped in Dead Sea salts for about half an hour. Then I bounded up the marble stairs, and … Eureka! I understood viscerally why people have always made pilgrimages to the Dead Sea for healing—and always will. Because it works! Not for everything, but certainly for my knee.

I also understood the story from my own Catholic tradition of Jesus walking on the neighboring fresh water in the Sea of Galilee, where countless people have since been healed. The big difference at the Sea of Galilee is that you can’t take those waters with even a grain of salt. To be healed, you must believe. Keep in mind that in Jesus’ day, a baptism for healing was probably a lot safer than going to a doctor—and so pure belief was reasonably declared to be more efficacious than experience: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Walk-in Placebos

About the same time as my epiphany in Israel, I was editing Anne Harrington, Ph.D., a renowned Harvard professor who teaches the history of science. Harrington wrote The Placebo Effect, and her articles for this magazine taught me that a placebo pill is an encapsulated story that can sometimes beat even “terminal” cancer. Pharmaceutical companies hate placebos because they cost nothing and work so well. Placebos are catalysts for self-healing, and so my experiences in Israel and my dive into placebo research put me on a quest to identify other places that act as catalysts, what I called “walk-in placebos.” Obvious examples are mineral springs because the waters have healing properties and because the springs tend to become sacred, which mean their healing stories take on powers of their own. Equally interesting is what happens when a famous walk-in placebo becomes “just a placebo.” People can get remarkably pissed off.

At the ancient Greek Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus, for example, countless patients over hundreds of years held healing sleepovers in rooms that writhed with asps and even vipers. Those people returned home with souvenir bottles of snake oil, which people in America still believed had healing properties until about a hundred years ago, when the story flipped asp-backward. Suddenly, writhing snakes and their oils were just placebos with no real power to heal! Equally concerning was the revelation that many bottles of fine American snake oil had never met a snake.

A new regulatory agency was tasked with identifying fake snake oil, which was undoubtedly a problem, but … why? The working ingredient of a placebo is the story—and a fake snake might work equally well. Worst of all, the snake of Asclepius (the Greek god of medicine) had joined the staff of the American Medical Association! (The AMA is represented by a snake entwined around a staff.) This was a screwup for the ages, and the result was right out of a Greek tragedy: Much like Oedipus, who poked out his own eyes after marrying his mother, the AMA double-blinded future medical research so as never to be fooled again by a story—despite the fact that for homo narrans, stories had been the greatest source of healing that ever was.

Storyless Healing

Double-blind protocols, which became the gold standard for medicine in the mid-20th century, created the raw, storyless data that can now beat cancers better than any story carried by a pill, a place, or even another person. As the data-crunching gets ever more granular with ever-faster computers and AI, we’re beginning to know how and even why a particular cancer takes hold—and exactly how to fight it. My son was healed on the verge of death from stage IV lymphoma. Perhaps as remarkable, blockbuster weight-loss drugs like Wegovy—now taken by one in seven Americans—promise to counteract the ills of the egregiously processed foods we consume daily. This is huge progress for storyless medicine, which seems to become more miraculous by the day.

In a double-blind world, however, healing stories like my knee in the Dead Sea and Jesus on the Galilee became mere anecdotes, which never add up to scientific data, and must be discounted. Why? Because such stories, by their very nature, are uncontrolled. Dutiful doctors were encouraged to give up stories and focus on data; thus, being an M.D.—traditionally a rewarding path to a wise and beloved elderhood—became a heartless, uphill slog to early burnout. My daughter quit a surgical residency because the life sucked. Meanwhile, healers who rely on stories or practices that can’t be replicated in a laboratory were branded as charlatans and quacks.

“What seems remarkable now is that any homo narrans can transform any place into a sacred healing or transformative space at any time.”

The Seeker’s Revenge

Ironically, a revolution against storyless, double-blind medicine can be traced in America to a true charlatan, a Romanian professor and raw foodie named Edmond Szekely, who set out to save the world with The Essene Gospel of Peace. The Essenes were an ascetic Jewish cult made famous by the Dead Sea Scrolls. In about 1920, Szekely was working on his doctorate and translated an ancient manuscript he found in the Vatican about Jesus as a vegetarian and health aficionado. Alas, the Vatican has no record of the manuscript or the visit, and the work is now considered an elaborate forgery—a grand attempt to popularize an idea that perhaps should have been true. In any case, the book took on a life of its own when in 1940, Szekely and his 18-year-old wife Deborah followed its teachings. They set up tents in the Mexican desert just across the border from San Diego for a new kind of health retreat called Rancho La Puerta.

Unlike hot springs, snake pits, and traditional religious retreats, this now world-famous resort originally offered sunshine, raw food, exercise, and health philosophies from the “gospel.” The larger truth is that the couple were true seekers and soon exotic practices like yoga, meditation, art as therapy, music, and almost every imaginable spa and workout practice arrived and often flourished in the desert—attracting more seekers of all sorts. Famous authors and thinkers came to talk in exchange for increasingly luxurious accommodations, great vegetarian food, appreciative audiences, and time to write. Deborah Szekely, now 103, was always the powerhouse behind “The Ranch,” even well before she divorced Edmond in 1970. She also created a legendary celebrity retreat called The Golden Door in Southern California.

Meanwhile, the Ranch inspired other retreat centers like Esalen in the ’60s, Canyon Ranch in the ’70s, and Miraval in the ’80s. Deborah was a good friend of my mentor, T George Harris, who launched Psychology Today, American Health, and this magazine. My wife, Mary Bemis, has retreated to the Ranch regularly since the late ’90s, when she was editor of American Spa magazine. In 2008, Mary and I spent our first real time there together when Deborah transformed the Ranch into an ashram for a week with a swami and his followers. The ashram was the sort of story-experiment that Deborah is known for, and the juxtaposition between the hierarchical swami, demanding and receiving subservience from his followers, and the regular Ranchgoers was jarring. As a journalist, I was encouraged to interview the swami for his deep wisdom, but when removed from his context, the massively robed guru came across as a jerk. It took me 16 years to finally write up that interview, and you just read it.

Finding a Balance

Double-blind scientific medicine can now tell us what works and why. The same science can also identify placebos like snake oil that take our time and money to provide us with healing that we actually provide for ourselves. And double-blind science can now prove that the stories we consume—much like our choices of food—can heal or harm. And that means people who shape our stories can heal or harm. Ultimately, any interaction with another person or their story has the potential to be healing or harming.

Now here’s the rub: Each of us is an uncontrolled experiment. Just as no amount of uncontrolled anecdotes can add up to scientific data, no amount of scientific data can predict the next meaningful anecdote in the story of any homo narrans. So we have good reason to protect our stories, whatever they are. We find it difficult if not dangerous to explore a basic question: “Am I living my best story?” Or even a good one?

Not coincidentally, the heart of a modern transformative retreat is now often described simply as a “container,” and the leader of the retreat is a person who can “hold space” and create a “safe container.” Creating a safe container may be the opposite of a journalist trying to condense a history of healing into four magazine pages. Instead, the best retreat leaders have both the distilled wisdom and the situational awareness to create practices and rituals that allow a person to metaphorically walk on water, letting go of limiting beliefs. Or plunge for a time into an entirely new set of beliefs.

A modern retreat is no longer a walk-in placebo but a place for the storytelling animal to experiment with new stories and to connect with new people to help carry those stories forward. We retreat not to renew faith, but to take off old blindfolds, see new paths, dream new dreams—and hopefully return inspired to do something useful in a world that desperately needs help.

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health^®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.