Rarely do I come across anything spiritual that is free. There is a portly lady from India named Amma who does travel around the world giving free hugs. The only catch is that you have to wait in a very long line for several hours before being embraced by her. I think the lesson there is patience, but I’m not sure. I had every intention of going to see her when she was in New York this summer, but I didn’t have the patience.

The best thing about these wallet-denting retreats is meeting like-minded people who hunger for spiritual knowledge, and the feeling of synchronistic harmony you get from being immersed in nature.

But at the workshop, despite the high I felt from being surrounded by trees, I also felt a sense of uneasiness. And this is coming from someone who has become increasingly comfortable with what many would describe as weird.

Yet even I was taken aback when our spikey-haired workshop leader performed an exorcism on one of the participants who’d apparently been carelessly fooling around with tarot cards and canoodling with dodgy gurus. As the man convulsed in front of a room of 50 or so people, I turned fearfully to the lady next to me, who was hunched forward on her chair with her feet planted down firmly and her hands in front of her as if she was a traffic conductor trying to halt traffic. “What are you doing?” I croaked, tempted to flee the premises and demand a full refund, but before I could leap away, she admonished me to keep my feet on the ground. Later, I learned it was to keep the bad energy from entering my body. I realized that I was one of the few new students and that the master healer had amassed a rather loyal cult following, many of whom had paid upwards of $1400 to become certified in this particular form of energy healing and had followed her to workshops across the country.

A morbid curiosity brought me back the next day. The same guy who got the exorcism had some sort of breakthrough while we were doing hands-on body work. We had to stop mid-session to watch what was being described as “Christ Consciousness” enter into his body while the master healer spread this new celestial energy across the room. People were shaking in rapture, and tears of joy were flowing freely; one woman even belted out opera. I felt absolutely nothing. Afterwards, I asked the master healer what was wrong with me. She said I was already full of light, already on some higher plane of consciousness, which I cheerfully accepted and bounced off to the cafeteria for a heaping plate of quinoa. Best to leave my cynical journalistic self back in New York City where it belongs, I told myself.

Of course there are people who get value out of these courses. But by the time I’d made it to the bookshop on Sunday afternoon, I had started to feel a little bit duped. I’d tried to keep an open mind, but I was instructed over and over again to use the meditation videos prescribed by the master healer herself. These videos could be downloaded for an additional fee on her website, and would helpfully remind you of other upcoming workshops that would, of course, cost more money. The master healer had also insinuated on many occasions that Reiki, the ancient Japanese spiritual practice and probably the most-widely known type of energy healing, was inferior and that her method was more progressive. Red flag.