"Byron Katie The Enlightened Master" Is Just A Part & Martha Beck Ghosts People She Mentors Once She's Used Us Up (Part 1)

My personal story of confusion, pain, and loss after filming PBS footage with Martha Beck and Byron Katie in front of Katie's husband Stephen Mitchell and my teacher Rachel Naomi Remen

I first heard about Byron Katie, who goes by Katie, because I co-taught a series of workshops with Oprah’s famous life coach Martha Beck. I loved her books and was excited to teach female doctors in recovery from the PTSD of becoming doctors for a “Heal the Healers” workshop. We brought these doctors to Martha’s horse ranch to do equine therapy, and in many ways, it was life-changing for us all.

Martha, who goes by Marty, was very enamored of the work of Byron Katie and taught it in her Martha Beck coaching programs, even though she’d never met Katie personally. She applied some of "The Work" in our workshop, and I had my reservations about it. She led one workshop exercise where we were supposed to write a letter to the person who hurt us the most. In this case, many of us were writing about doctors in our medical training, who had caused us a lot of harm.

After we wrote out our rants, we were then instructed to "turn it around" and figure out how we were the thing we'd just written, how we were guilty of doing what had been done to us, or how we were actually the perpetrator in whatever dynamic we'd written about. It was very confusing, with lots of puzzled faces and furrowed brows. Because we were getting gaslit! We were NOT guilty of throwing bloody scalpels at anyone the way these male doctors had done to us. We were not guilty of sexually harassing anyone, the way we'd been sexually harassed. The whole thing was just weird, but nobody spoke up to challenge Marty, including me.

I was very new to leading workshops, having just published Mind Over Medicine, which was a New York Times bestselling book that turned into four TEDx talks and two PBS specials. I didn’t know what I was doing with all that sudden fame, but Martha took me under her wing and promised to show me the way. Power wise, I was so “one down” that I just deferred to her Harvard degrees, her mentorship, her ties to Oprah, and her vaster experience, questioning myself more so than I questioned her.

After being introduced to “The Work” of Byron Katie via Marty, I signed up for a weekend workshop at Esalen with Katie, so I could get more experience with The Work myself. I figured I just didn't get it, and I should train with the master herself.

End All Suffering In One Weekend: Byron Katie At Esalen

That was the gist of marketing tagline for the weekend workshop, where she’d sold out all the beds and all of the floor spots at Esalen. I realized it was probably no coincidence that my own marketing tagline, which was something like “Improve your health symptoms by 10% by treating your trauma and getting to the root cause of your illness,” got me far fewer students.

I’ll post about the shit show I witnessed first person at Esalen in 2015 in Part 2 of this essay. So please subscribe if you don’t want to miss it!

Visiting Byron Katie & Stephen Mitchell’s Ojai Home To Film For PBS With Martha Beck

Even though I’d just witnessed some truly disturbing “The Work,” after the workshop, I was still influenced by how enthralled with Katie Marty was, and I was still doubting my own discernment. So I approached Katie to invite her to participate in a PBS project I was working on. I’d also invited Marty, in addition to my physician mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, the author of the wonderful book Kitchen Table Wisdom.

Katie said yes to my invitation to film footage for the bonus videos to accompany my PBS special, which thrilled Marty, since she’d never met Katie and was also invited. Marty would finally get to meet Katie in person. We all traveled to Ojai to film Katie in the home she shares with Stephen Mitchell, the scholar who translates sacred texts.

In person, I found Katie…odd. Charming, but strange. She’d say things about how she was so “in the now” that she’d wake up in the morning next to Stephen and not recognize him, saying she’d think, “Wow, who’s this hot guy in my bed? How lucky am I!”

But to me, as a doctor, that didn’t sound like enlightenment. That sounded like 50 First Dates-level brain damage. Or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Like one part of her had gone to bed next to Stephen and carried that memory, and another part, who was dissociated from the other part with a steel wall around it, woke up with no memory that he even existed. That’s not presence; that’s a medical condition that shouldn’t be spiritualized.

Katie was mesmerizing in person, with these violet eyes that you can’t help staring into. We had lunch and moved onto filming. I interviewed Marty and Rachel first, and then we filmed a four-way conversation between all of us. My one-on-one interview with Katie was last. We were just wrapping up when Katie told me that was the best interview she’d ever had, that nobody had shown this much interest in “Byron Katie The Enlightened Master” before, but that she wanted me to know the rest of her.

She said it just like that, like one word, "ByronKatieTheEnlightenedMaster."
Katie said ByronKatieTheEnlightenedMaster was the only part most people like Oprah wanted to interview, but that the other parts of Katie, the ones who aren’t so enlightened or present or good or nice, the ones who get angry and sad and acted out sometimes, liked me so much that they wanted to meet me too.

I was a bit confused, but I accepted her invitation and said yes, I’d be happy to meet any other parts of her. Her whole demeanor changed, and her voice shifted and took on a sweet, childish tone, and that's when my doctor self realized, without making any diagnosis, that I might be talking to an “alter” or what, in IFS, we would call a “part." This part was very sweet and vulnerable and said she wanted some air time. It was tired of ByronKatieTheEnlightenedMaster taking up all the room in her system, especially during television interviews. This part really liked me and wanted to tell me her stories.

I felt tender towards her and said I would listen. That's when Stephen jumped up and screamed "Stop the cameras!" at the film crew. And that was that. Her mask had slipped, and we caught it on camera, on footage I own but did not use, not only because Stephen forbid it, but also because I felt empathy for Katie and her parts and didn't want to hurt her.

I didn't care whether she was enlightened or just a real person like the rest of us. I barely knew her and didn't have the kind of guru projections Marty did. If anything, I felt relieved to realize that it wasn't that I wasn't getting it. My instincts had been right that this wasn't enlightened presence; it was some sort of mental health struggle, something that needs our compassion, not our judgment.

Afterwards, I was sitting next to Katie on the sofa, and Rachel was sitting on the armrest of the sofa behind me (“Because I’ve got your back,” Rachel said. She told me later she didn’t think anybody else did.) Marty was sitting on her knees on the floor in front of Katie and would not get up from her position of weird deference, as if Katie was some Indian guru Marty was supplicating herself before.

Marty was beside herself when Katie said yes to an invitation to come visit Marty’s horse ranch the next day. She literally jumped onto the patio table and started jumping up and down like an excited little girl. It was adorable. I was happy for her. I wasn’t invited, but I was fine with that, since I knew Marty probably wanted her day in the sun with her beloved guru. I sent a gushing email thanking everyone for their time, presence, and footage, and Stephen responded with a critical take down that felt like it came out of left field.

Rachel and I drove back home, and I never heard from Marty, Stephen, or Katie again. Marty and I were midway through planning our third online class collaboration, but she never even cancelled or verified why she was pulling out. Her CEO was assigned to just tell me it wasn’t happening, with no explanation why.

It was haunted by the question of “Why?” Why had Marty just ghosted me in the middle of preparing for a class we were teaching, with zero explanation? I’d texted Marty frantically afterwards, offering to see a therapist and apologizing in case I’d done something wrong. I was thrown into a panic when she wouldn’t respond and I realized I was about to be abandoned by yet another mentor. Rachel tried to comfort me, reassuring me that she would never do that to me, and she’s kept her word. I was deeply upset by the abandonment, with no explanation. I’ve questioned myself and my behavior 1000 times over, wondering what I’d done wrong, never able to figure it out.

They Think They Can Get Away With Keeping These Secrets

Thinking back on all that, what distresses me the most is that people like Marty, Katie, and Stephen think they can just mislead the public about who Katie really is. They can promote hurtful spiritual bypassing teachings and misuse The Work in ways that sometimes hurts people. They can sell out workshops with deceitful marketing. And they get away with it. Right now, you can go to Ojai and take a one day workshop on Katie’s property at the end of the month. Some people will have a great experience. Other people will get hurt and stay silent about it. A few scared people might say something about their own experience afterwards, but most won’t. They’ll just go find another teacher and hope for the best.

But what nerve they have! These folks think they can just ghost me, criticize me when I hadn’t done anything wrong, and accuse of having poor discernment, as Stephen did. He wrote, “I see you as good-hearted and sincere, and I appreciate that you are trying your best to help people, but you are seriously lacking in discernment in my opinion.” He reminded me that “Everything that happened in our home is confidential information, and not to go beyond our home. I'm sure you understand.”

He was right about my poor discernment. I should have known better than to trust Marty, Katie, or him. But I had never signed an NDA or consented to keep anything confidential, something that requires consent from all parties beforehand and something I would not have done, given that we had film releases and were planning to broadcast it on PBS. It’s really convenient to demand confidentiality only after something untoward has happened. That’s the same excuse Gabor Maté used to try to silence me after an event that caused me harm last week, which I wrote about here. If a professional meeting is supposed to be kept confidential, good ethics would demand that all parties agree to it beforehand, rather than slap it on after the fact to protect someone from being exposed for something they don’t want exposed.

It galls me to think about how many people in this industry have done really horrible things, not just to me personally, but to people who entrust them with their most vulnerable parts, and then they expect to get away with it, without any empathy for their impact on us. And why would they expect my silence? As if my silence- to protect their reputations- is a given? Even though I’m a writer, with a biggish platform, and a doctor, who cares about vulnerable people not getting hurt. They expect me to be silent because I’m a woman? Because I’m less famous than them? Because I care about people and don’t want to hurt anyone (which is true)? Because they trust me to maintain the status quo and not rock the boat, so I can benefit from proximity to power and keep the endorsements and affiliate sales flowing? Because they think I’ll sell out my own integrity and responsibility to warn others- to protect them, because they’re rich, because they’re famous?

We think the people who befriended Jeffrey Epstein were entitled. But oh my, the entitlement of the people in the spirituality/ wellness space! They just assume they can behave as badly as they feel like it, and everyone else will protect them. It’s not just me and Bridgette who have stayed silent this long. It takes hundreds of people staying silent for these folks to continue to cash in on a corrupt industry.

Because everyone's making money from them. They're surrounded by enablers who stay silent- because we're scared, because we’re blended with conflict avoidant parts, because we do “The Work” on ourselves and gaslight our own reality, because so many spiritual teachings teach us to bypass accountability, because we care about their feelings and don’t want to hurt them, because so many people love Katie, Marty, and Stephen’s work and I didn’t want to take away anything others were benefitting from, because we don’t want to incur their wrath, because we feel intimidated, because proximity to power benefits us, because we’re single moms who worry what will happen to our careers if we don't stay silent, because they threaten lawsuits, because we don't want to put ourselves through getting gaslit- AGAIN.

Shame Has To Change Sides

There are lots of reasons people stay silent. But the release of the Epstein files has just flattened me and left me incapable of staying silent about the ways I've been mistreated by the people so many of you look up to. Because silence is violence. Because people with the power to stop Jeffrey Epstein didn’t call the police when they should have. Because Deepak Chopra and so many others didn’t call the police when he could have. And it’s not okay. Because my world is not the same as it was before the Epstein files were released. Because how can we be safe if those with the power to stop abuse don’t even say anything to anyone with the power to stop it?Because those with the power owe it to those with less power to speak up, to stop it, to do something, even if it costs us something we can’t afford to lose.

To the other enablers who have kept silent, let me just say we can’t keep protecting these people, even if the cost of speaking up is high. Let me also say this: Please do not email me so you can tell me your story in private. If you have a story to tell, please post it in the comments or write your own blog or tell your own story and name names. I beg you not to burden me with more secrets you that aren’t mine to share.

My Mea Culpa

I'm sincerely sorry I stayed silent so long. I really am. I know it’s not enough to just apologize, and I know nobody wants to hear my excuses or fears about why I didn’t back then. But that’s why I’m speaking up now. Because I feel ashamed that I’ve kept my mouth shut, when I have A LOT to say. As Gisèle Pelicot says in her new memoir A Hymn To Life “Shame has to change sides.”

Marty and Stephen should feel ashamed for treating me like I wasn’t a person, like I was something to just be used up and then discarded when I was no longer useful to their ambitions or profiteering. Stephen and Katie both should feel ashamed for letting anyone promote the lie that Byron Katie is some sort of perfect, enlightened being. Marty should feel ashamed that she trained all those Martha Beck life coaches to practice “The Work,” when it’s hurting people and causing thousands of coaches to gaslight vulnerable trauma survivors. Marty should feel ashamed for treating Bridgette (and so many others) the way she did. Katie should be ashamed for making money off offering “the end of suffering” in one weekend.

And yes, I should- and do- feel ashamed that it’s taken me this long to start saying something more than lists of teachers I do and don’t recommend. I enabled their behavior with my silence, and for that, I feel awful. This is my attempt to do the right thing, even though I know it’s not enough.

There have been people braver than me, people who were less silent, who blew the whistle on Byron Katie long before I ever met her. After all those painful shenanigans, I started hearing other stories about Katie. Someone referred me to the online book written by a former employee Janaki, which you can read here.

Marty Marries A “One Down” Student While Still Married To Her Wife Karen

Other than her family members, who have been public about how they believe Martha Beck lied in her book about her family and the Mormon Church Leaving The Saints, I’m not aware of anyone publishing anything about Martha Beck’s abuses of power and mistreatment of friends, colleagues, and employees, but other people who had been mistreated and then ghosted by Marty saw that I’d fallen out of favor with her and reached out to tell me their stories of being abandoned by her without explanation, as if they were the sun to Marty and then, boom- plutoed. I started feeling less alone, took it less personally, got some good therapy, and started to heal.

I felt defensive on her behalf back then, when Marty told me how her family was constantly trying to discredit her and call her psychotic and delusional on Wikipedia. She said she had to go direct to Wikipedia to fight her family, because they all say she made up the whole story in Leaving The Saints, especially the part about her father sexually molesting her. But I believed Marty, not her family’s accusations against her. Knowing how perpetrators typically react after stories of sexual abuse come out, I’m still going to give Marty the benefit of the doubt on that one, because I choose to believe victims. But it does cast some of her credibility into doubt for me.

I had met Karen, Marty’s longtime wife, several times. But years later, I started hearing rumors from people still in Marty’s circle that she had hooked up with someone two decades younger than she and Karen were. According to the gossip among some of my friends who had also been ditched by Marty, she’d hooked up with a much younger woman- and married her- while staying married to Karen, allegedly with Karen’s blessing. They’d had a baby and were apparently living happily ever after. Then in 2022, I listened to the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, with Glennon Doyle & Co, called Throuple Life, interviewing Marty and Rowan Mangan, the rumored new wife, which confirmed the rumors I’d been hearing.

Now I don’t have any problems with ethical non-monogamy. I’ve have had my own brief (and disastrous) experiment with polyamory myself. I learned a ton and some of the relational lessons I learned- about boundaries, three-way communications, and how to care about everyone involved- helped me greatly in my monogamous life. But let’s just say it didn’t surprise me that Marty met “Ro” when Ro was a student who had paid a lot of money (like I had) to go to an African safari workshop with Marty. Having hung out with hundreds of celebrities in the spirituality and wellness space, almost everyone I met, male and female alike, were married to people they met as students, which in my ethics, is absolutely an abuse of power.

Spiritual teachers, transformational leaders, life coaches, yoga teachers, doctors, gurus, therapists- your “one down” from a power dynamic students, followers, readers, clients, patients, and fans are not your f’ing dating pool! Hook up with your peers, not the students and clients and fans, with all their intense projections and transference and idealized adoration! You owe them that. Stop objectifying those who are PAYING you to be more ethical and trustworthy than that.

It didn’t surprise me that this student of Marty’s, who was in a “one down” power position but admits on the podcast that she had the “teacher’s pet” schtick down pat, had gone to the workshop with the intention of weaseling her way into Marty’s personal life. Nobody talks about what happened between Marty and Ro- in Africa or afterwards, that landed Ro a spot living in Martha’s two-house property. I guess we’re supposed to believe that there was nothing inappropriate that happened in African or afterwards- no cheating, no affair between Ro and Marty, that Ro and Marty just became such good friends that they decided to live together. And maybe that’s true.

The PR story is that Ro gets invited to live in Marty’s commune, with her wife Karen, who allegedly is the one who falls in love with Ro. Having this woman on their ranch is so joyous that Karen’s heart was just pouring with love for Ro, and Marty wasn’t jealous at all. Instead, her heart just poured with love for Ro and Karen, who were falling in love. And when she heard that her wife had fallen in love with Ro, and she realized that she too was in love with Ro, the throuple was born.

So if I get this right, Marty left Mormonism, wrote a bestselling book trashing Mormonism and her family, and is now polygamous, raising the baby of her second wife, who she met as the teacher’s pet student, and bragging about it to Glennon Doyle and the world, shamelessly. So this woman who wrote a book called The Way of Integrity invited a student who was full of projections about her as Martha Beck, the guru, someone who admits that her whole purpose for going to Africa was to seduce her way into Marty’s life, someone over a decade younger than her and in a “one down” power position- to move in with her and become her second wife. And Marty and Ro (without Karen) then go on a famous podcast to brag about their intense connection and their special family. And even though Marty’s kids are about Ro’s age, they instantly welcomed her in and are so psyched about it! And Glennon and Abby are all over it with love-bombing and praise and not a single question mark about whether there’s any integrity in this situation?

I’m still scratching my head. I mean, I’m no prude. And I have no judgments of people who choose the polyamorous life. If a polygamous throuple makes three consenting adults happy, by all means. But if there’s an imbalance in the power dynamics, and if one of them is a twenty-something year younger client of Marty’s…um…this is not ambiguous for me.

I feel so protective of Ro, as the younger woman and mother of the child. Not to infantalize her- I’m sure she can take care of herself- but I want to warn her and tell her what happened to me and so many others I’m friends with.

She’ll ghost you, once she’s done with you. Just ask the dozens of us who didn’t even get a goodbye or an explanation.

Please Don’t Pedestalize Any Of Us

But enough celebrity gossip already. That’s not why I’m posting these essays. I’m posting them so any of you with guru projections onto Martha or Katie can do your own deconstruction, so you can be careful how you spend your money and at least know the character of the kinds of folks who make it to the top in this industry, the ones who conveniently talk about integrity but don’t actually call themselves out on their own integrity breaches.

I have plenty of skeletons in my closet, so I’m not one to cast stones. I don’t share all of my many flaws with y’all, because a girl has a right to some privacy, and to be honest, there are some things my daughter isn’t old enough to know about her mom. But I also don’t position myself as someone who’s enlightened or full of integrity or incapable of suffering. I out myself on the regular about my bad behavior, mistakes, and the traumas that underlie them, so none of you will be tempted to think I’m some paragon of virtue who can out other people while standing on some moral high horse.

Nobody can do this hard deconstruction work- but you. Those in the cult recovery space can help. I recommend Indoctrination podcast and A Little Bit Culty, as well as many wonderful instructional books and cult survivor memoirs out there. The more you see the same stories over and over, the more you can spot these culty dynamics in the leaders you follow and the communities you join. As seekers, what we can do is participate in cult-proofing our communities, and as leaders, it is incumbent upon us to do the same.

Good luck and be gentle with yourself when you question the teachings you’ve taken as gospel fact. Take what helps from The Work or Martha Beck’s teachings or coaching program. Find your baby in the bathwater, but don’t pretend these people have it altogether any more than you do. YOU are the one you’ve been waiting for- the guru inside, the Self we all have. Us authors and teachers are just as f’ed up as you are- and often, more so. So give yourself a hug. You ARE good enough. There are no perfect humans. And there’s no such thing as enlightenment, so you can take a deep breath and relax just a little bit more.

In my next post, I’ll deconstruction Byron Katie’s “The Work” in Part 2 of this series, so please subscribe if you don’t want to miss it.

*My new book RELATIONSICK is now available for preorder at Relationsick.com! Because preorders are so essential to the publishing process, we have special bonuses to incentivize you to buy more than one book, so check it out here. The book is about the health implications of narcissistic abuse, so it couldn’t be more relevant at a time like this. I co-wrote it with Harvard psychiatrist Jeffrey Rediger, author of CURED.