interesting anon
reposting an earlier notable about Alva Johnson for the evening night shift. Check out her linkedin. Omega Institute just down the road from NXIVM HQ and she connects to
John of God
Background info that got the dig going:
Operations Administrative Director Alva Johnson
Started on the campaign as Alabama director of outreach and coalitions, Oct. 2015-March 2016, then part of the National Strike Team, March-July 2016. Event producer and project manager for Heaven on Earth Foundation, Inc. Feb. 2005-Nov. 2015. Senior recruiter for Celebrity Personal Assistants, Inc., Dec. 2001-Feb. 2005. B.A. in mass communication/media studies from University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Omega Institute could use a dig
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Portraits in the Omega Institute Faculty Dining Room
This past fall I got to spend a great week with folks from the Yoga Service Council on a writing retreat at Omega. Omega donated the space. One of our breakout groups was allowed to use the faculty dining room, just off the main hall. This is where all Omega presenters come to eat, away from the crowds.
The walls of the room were lined with portraits of famous past guests. Like if you went to House of Blues and all the musicians are up there, holding silent court.
I took a video tour of the room. The lede photo above is a screenshot. Aside from Philip Glass in the top left, counterclockwise from the bottom left, we have:
John of God
Gloria Steinem
Eckhart Tolle
What kind of a place, what kind of a generation stitches these figures together with some pretence of coherence?
There’s Steinem, hemmed in between two men. John of God sells snake oil and assaults women, and Tolle mumbles dissociative word salad to cool a burning world.
All three have been at Omega. All three have appeared on Oprah.
Under the assumption that they share something in common, these men are elevated on either side of the feminist activist who actually got shit done.
I had this conflicting impulse to either take Steinem’s picture out of there, or take the other ones down. Who really deserves to be there?
Who will tell us what this part of the Left’s history means? How activism was kneecapped by and equated with self-obsession on the workshop circuit?
Who will show how John of God has been valued at places like Omega because, in part, he posed an alternative to the medical realism so essential to things like the reproductive rights movement? Or because he represented an acceptable, “shamanic” version of how to dominate (mostly women’s) bodies with charisma?
Who will study how Tolle has been valued at Omega because he let people off the hook of agitating for structural change, by telling people that conflict is all story in their minds?
When I think about the fractured Left, I keep thinking about this room, this photo gallery, as incoherent as a family’s. John milking charisma with that smile. Eckhart perpetually out-of-focus. Gloria, beaming fullness and generous agency.
I try to feel better about the world because at least I’m eating a vegetarian meal, and the folks at the table next to me are working on their chakras.
And when the sarcasm subsides I look out the window and know that the woods are still dark and deep.