Freaky shit crosses my desk every day
Was the English department contributing money to a cult?
I first saw the name of an organization called the Innerlight Sanctuary in an email automatically sent by the accounting program Workday on September 10, 2018. “A Task Awaits You,” the email said. I was directed to approve a payment of $2,500 to the firm “Innerlight Sancturary LLC.”
(The email actually said: “Sancturary.” The extra “r” was like something you might find on a handmade sign at a school festival in eighth grade.)
What was the Innerlight Sanctuary? I wondered if it was an Antinomian group. I was familiar with the concept from studying Milton and other radical Protestant thinkers of the seventeenth century who professed to be guided by an inner light rather than any external law.
I consulted the department secretary, and we determined that the director of the Innerlight Sanctuary was Niki Elliott, who was scheduled to deliver a lecture entitled “Establishing a Culture of Wellness in Higher Education” in conjunction with Professor Toni’s course “Healing Narratives.” Elliott had academic credentials: a Ph.D. in education from UCLA, and an administrative position in the Center for Neurodiversity, Learning, and Wellness at the University of La Verne. Toni had requested $500 for Elliott’s honorarium, an expense that I had personally approved. The rest of the $2,500 was made up of contributions from the dean, the president, and various academic departments. Because Workday had designated me “Cost Center Manager,” the college needed my approval in order to issue the payment.
Ah. That was a relief. The Innerlight Sanctuary was Niki Elliott, who had legitimate business with the English department as part of a course taught by one of our faculty.
Two months later, Toni wanted to pay Elliott another $1,000.
Hi Aaron,
Can I get $1000 for Dr. Niki Elliott doing a secondary support workshop for my Healing Narratives students? The students requested her to come and she is doing a specialized support workshop for them to deal with current trauma on campus around sexual violence, trans prejudice, lack of safe space, racial trauma, and so on.
Thank you,
[Toni]
Hello [Toni]
When would you like to do this? The department would have to vote on your request (because the amount is $1000, and really it’s more than $1000 in the sense that the department contributed $500 for her event earlier in the semester).
I wasn’t planning to schedule a department meeting again so soon, but we do need to continue our discussion of future hires. We might be able to do a meeting as soon as next Thursday, 11/15. Would that work?
Best wishes
Aaron
Hi Aaron,
It doesn’t have to be $1000 but I would like to give her an honorarium of some substantive kind as this was a second, distinct, 115-430 workshop. I was writing you AS she was doing the workshop today; the students requested it with my approval and she agreed to come gratis. But she put so much work into it and did so much with them in relation to their generally triggered/traumatized state due to campus climate and the political climate in general (the class as a whole has been expressing these experiences) and in connection with our discussions of mindfulness, meditation, and selfcare/healing, readings of Toni Cade Bambara, Saidya Hartman, Octavia Butler, and Alexis Gumbs, I think she should be compensated as a matter of fairness.
Could you ask the department by email?
Bests,
[Toni]
“I was writing you,” Toni revealed with remarkable candor, “AS she was doing the workshop today.” During a break, or perhaps while Elliott was speaking to the students in her class, Toni got out her smartphone and sent me an email requesting an additional payment of $1,000.
Probably I should have said no at that point. I was tempted to send an outraged reply: “That is completely unprofessional!”, “You are insulting me and your guest,” or something to that effect.
I might also have been justified in rejecting the new request on the grounds that I had previously approved spending $500 for Elliott’s lecture, and any requests for additional money would be hot dog slicing. As far as Elliott was concerned, payment for the workshop was included in the original honorarium; apparently she did not expect to be paid more money.
Or I might have asked whether energy balancing and mindfulness healing had anything to do with literary studies. Wasn’t it fraudulent to suggest that scholars of literature or education could heal the trauma of their students, even trauma in areas where some literature professors claimed special insight, such as “sexual violence, trans prejudice [probably “anti-trans prejudice” is what she intended], lack of safe space, racial trauma, and so on”? But I did not ask these questions at the time. You might say that I was careful not to ask these questions.
However, I was persuaded by Toni’s argument that Elliott had been asked to do more work than she initially agreed to do. People should be paid for doing work, I reasoned. I was willing to break the rule about hot dog slicing and spend more money on Elliott’s honorarium as long as the total sum remained less than $1,000 and therefore a small expense, at least in name.
In my reply to Toni, I patiently explained the department’s rules:
I could authorize $499 for this honorarium. If you want more than that, we have to ask the department. And the department has to vote in person, not by email. These rules are intended to encourage participation, transparency, and efficiency, and to avoid leaving big decisions to the personal judgment of the chair.
Another possibility is that you could use your opp funds for the honorarium.
Please let me know if you want me to schedule a meeting.
Best wishes
Aaron
Toni chose to bring her request to a department meeting, where her colleagues quickly approved adding $1,000 to Elliott’s honorarium.
In January, I received notice of a new payment of $1,300 to the Innerlight Sanctuary. The money came from Toni’s opportunity fund, which she spent at her discretion on projects related to her research and teaching. The receipt showed that she had registered for a course, “Innerlight Level II.”
What did that mean?
I checked out Elliott’s book I Feel Your Pain: A 7-Step Survival Guide for Empaths, Intuitives, and Highly Sensitive People. In this book, Elliott sometimes describes herself as a psychic or healer, but she doesn’t like the way people react to these terms. She prefers “intuitive empath.” Although she is a doctor of education, not medicine, her sensitivity to other people’s energy makes it possible for her to diagnose their physical illnesses. For example:
-She smells her father through “clairolfaction” (that is to say, she smells him although he is not present), and knows that he must be ill.
-She stands next to a woman at a party, feels a pain in her breast, and knows that the woman must have cancer. (Remarkably, Elliott, who experiences pain in her own breast, is not the one who needs to see a doctor. She can tell that the pain belongs to the woman standing next to her.)
-Thinking about an absent friend, she feels a sharp pain. This information allows her to diagnose and treat a problem in her friend’s liver:
“I’ve been learning something called energetic healing for a while now, and every time I think of you, I get this horrible pain in the area around my liver.”
“My doctor just told me that I need to have my liver tested. How could you know that?”
“Like I said, I’m an energy therapist and something called an intuitive empath. I often feel other people’s pain in my body and it doesn’t go away until I give them the message I receive for them. Would you like to hear the message I’ve been given for you?”
“Yes . . . I want to hear it.”
“Okay, here’s the message: If you cleanse for 10 days and work with some very specific essential oils, your liver will be okay and your doctor won’t find any problems when they test you.”
(I Feel Your Pain, xv-xvi)
[I have edited this quotation so that it includes only dialogue, without any of Elliott’s commentary.]
-At the grocery store, standing next to a pregnant woman, she hears the voice of the woman’s unborn baby:
“Hi. I’m learning to work with intuitive energy and sometimes I receive random messages for people.”
“Really? I’d love to hear a message.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m crazy, but I can hear babies talk to me and your baby just asked me to tell you to please do what the doctor said.”
(I Feel Your Pain, 26)
[I have removed Elliott’s commentary from this quotation.]
When I read stories like this, my heart sinks. I fear the dullness that has blighted the work of artists in the U.S. now afflicts our fakers and crackpots as well. Elliott lacks the imaginative bravado of someone like Edgar Cayce, whom she cites as an authority on the etiology of clairvoyance. Cayce went into trances and told wild stories about lost civilizations; Elliott goes to Whole Foods, purchases essential oils, and engages her neighbors in conversations about their ailments. Her advice seems rather timid: she advises the people whose pain she empathically intuits that they should see a doctor and follow the doctor’s advice.
The book opens with a disclaimer that is even more modest:
The material presented in this book is for educational purposes only. The author does not intend to offer medical advice or in any way suggest that the exercises presented here are a substitute for treatment from a licensed mental health professional or physician.
(I Feel Your Pain, v)
When unborn babies communicate with her telepathically, in complete English sentences, they likewise defer to the medical profession. Their messages offer no striking revelations, only banal advice: they want their mothers to eat more vegetables and do what the doctor says.
However, when she writes about her day job working with special needs children at the Aveson School of Leaders, a charter school in Altadena, Elliott is emboldened to make immodest claims for the success of the Innerlight Method. After one energy balancing session, a nonverbal child starts using words. After a few energy balancing sessions, a formerly troubled child stops misbehaving, and can interact with other children without a “behavior aide.” According to articles that Elliott published in Energy Magazine, “approximately 75%” of the students in her care “show a significant reduction or complete elimination of behaviors within the time frame of one to four weeks.” (“Energy Therapy for Empathic and Intuitive Children,” Energy Magazine, January/February 2014, 4.)
These are empirical claims, sort of. There are no disclaimers, but there is a lot of ambiguous language. For example, what is a “significant reduction”? There could be several steps between “significant reduction” and “complete elimination.”
In these articles, Elliott uses the techniques of intuitive empathy to feel the pain and balance the energy of students at the Aveson School. In the following episodes, she communicates telepathically with nonverbal students:
Intuitive conversations allow me to speak to the higher consciousness of my clients. This is a highly effective process, especially when I am working with very young or non-verbal children. It enables me to understand their needs at a level they are unable to consciously access or communicate to their parents. I began by asking, “Evan what would you like me to know about you that can help improve your autism symptoms? How would you like me to approach this energy therapy session?” The response I received from his higher consciousness was stunning. Evan gently told me, “Dr. Niki, please don’t assume I have something called autism. Then you can help me.”
In that moment, I realized that I had unconsciously allowed my ideas about autism and his mother’s concerns about limitations to color my consciousness and affect my ability to see him as whole and divine. Evan made it clear that I could not help him heal energetically with a tainted vision of him.
When the second child arrived, I felt the same energy. Intuitively, I asked what I needed to do or change so I could help him. He told me that the energy I felt in the room was the fear and sadness of the behavior aides. He said, “Dr. Niki, they want to be happy for us getting better, but they know that they will lose their jobs if we don’t need them to help control our behavior. Their consciousness is interfering with our work. You have to find a way to shift it because they are putting a lid on our energetic container. Please ask the aides to take the lid off our healing potential.”
I was speechless in that moment. First of all, I had never heard of anything called an energetic container.
(“Helping Children Heal with Conscious Energy Work,” Energy Magazine, March/April 2017, 23-24.)
Telepathic communication, whatever virtues it may have in the field of education, has some obvious dangers. Any school administrator who uses telepathy to communicate with small children, especially nonverbal children, should take care to guard against the possibility that the child’s side of the communication may be the mere delusion of the administrator. It seems likely that there is some delusion at work in cases where the child’s “higher consciousness” telepathically speaks in the specialized vocabulary of energetic healing.
(In the second excerpt, it’s remarkable that the child who perceives that the staff may be unconsciously encouraging the students to misbehave does not consider the possibility that Dr. Niki may similarly be incentivized to create work for herself by inventing new applications for her own specialty, energy balancing.)
Although Elliott doesn’t strike me as a charismatic cult leader, she does seem to be a faker. Her clairvoyant episodes are similar to the performances of faith healers (a term that she doesn’t like, but sometimes accepts). Probably she uses the tricks by which healers elicit information from their clients. “Intuitive empathy” might be a name for such fakery.
In the field of education, the value of Elliott’s methods is doubtful. She makes bold claims for their effectiveness, which she does not support. Probably she can’t support them.
According to I Feel Your Pain, Elliott parted ways with the Aveson School of Leaders in response to complaints from parents that she was giving religious instruction. The director of the school tells her:
I am really concerned about my responsibility to uphold the separation of church and state. I know you’ve explained that energy work is not religious, but we are worried that some parents feel that we are promoting a religious experience. I need to ask you not to practice energy balancing here on campus again until I understand more about it.
(I Feel Your Pain, 153)
Unlike the director of the Aveson School, I was not tasked to separate church and state. The question that faced me was different. What was an appropriate amount of money for a literature department at a small liberal arts college to pay to an organization like the Innerlight Sanctuary?
Strictly speaking, none. The problem with the Innerlight Sanctuary wasn’t its religion. (Anyway, Elliott called it a “secular spiritual” institution, whatever that means.) The problem wasn’t that it promoted an incoherent, diminished version of ideas from religious and non-religious sources (Protestantism, yoga, Reiki, faith healing, paranormal science, neuroscience, total quality management, diversity consulting). The problem was that a liberal arts college should not promote fraudulent claims about the medical and educational effects of the Innerlight Method.
But that wasn’t my question. It wasn’t exactly my place to ask that question. As the department chair and cost center manager, my job was to approve expenses in support of the professional activities of the faculty in the English department. Were the payments to the Innerlight Sanctuary supporting research and teaching? Yes. Clearly the invoices were for activities that were part of the curriculum of Toni’s popular course “Healing Narratives.” Toni was the expert on the subject of her own teaching and research, and, according to her judgment, these materials were relevant to her syllabus.
Nor was it exactly my place to ask whether Toni was committing academic fraud in the design of this course. In the academy, there are places and occasions for reviewing research and teaching. Review boards evaluate experiments on human subjects in terms of respect for persons, benevolence, and justice. (Such review, although ordinarily not conducted in literature departments, might be appropriate for a course that promises to heal students.) Outside experts review manuscripts for scholarly journals and book publishers; when professors are candidates for reappointment, tenure, and promotion, their teaching files are reviewed by subcommittees within departments, by college committees, by the dean and president of the college, by the faculty cabinet, and by the board of trustees. Toni’s teaching file had been reviewed as recently as 2017, when she was promoted to the rank of full professor. At the time, no one had a word to say against the Innerlight Sanctuary.
I further rationalized the expense in this way. What if Professor Geoffrey wanted to be reimbursed for a payment to a Buddhist monastery or a Benedictine monastery? Obviously such an expense could be relevant to some of his courses in literary studies. How would that be different from the participation of the Innerlight Sanctuary in Toni’s course? What about the bogus fields of knowledge that literature professors seriously study? Innerlight Method might be fraudulent, but was it more fraudulent than psychoanalysis? What about my own academic interests?
I’ll go further than that. “Weird” in the title “Weird at My School” may sound ambivalent. It’s intended to be ambivalent. But this newsletter is ultimately on the side of weirdness. I have written elsewhere, sometimes in academic publications, about the freaky shit that I am into. I have written elsewhere, too, in defense of the weird ideas of my colleagues. I wrote: “Academic freedom gives even low-value speech a little bit of value. If weird, wrong, offensive speech says nothing else, it says: this is a place where people are free to speak their minds, and all may avail themselves of this freedom.”
I’m in favor of the weird ideas of my colleagues, simply for the reason that they are weird. I’m in favor of professors teaching Neoplatonism, panpsychism, occasionalism, communism, Critical Race Theory, and Straussianism. I’m in favor of Mark Crispin Miller teaching conspiracy theories. I’m in favor of Frank Wilderson teaching Afropessimism. Professors should study crackpot ideas. Professors who are crackpots should defend their crackpot ideas so that other professors can see what their colleagues think, and so that they can refute them (if they are sharp enough to do that successfully). If no one learns anything from this exercise, at least it will encourage free thought and expression, which are valuable in themselves.
Perhaps the dean and the president of the college agreed with me, because their offices also paid thousands of dollars to the Innerlight Sanctuary. In June 2019, the dean’s office paid $2,395 so that Toni could receive Level III training in Innerlight Method. The president committed $13,000 from her own discretionary fund to pay for twenty students in Toni’s “Healing Narratives” class to receive Level I training. I was copied on an email thread where a staff member at the Innerlight Sanctuary gushed, “I am really excited that so many students will have the opportunity to experience Level 1 because of your efforts!! Thank you! Blessings, Stevie.”
I would be very curious to hear from the president, who studies neuroscience as well as literature, her candid opinion of the brain science behind this training.
In January 2019, when I approved the expense report for Toni’s Level II training, I wondered if someday I might be blamed for misuse of the department’s restricted funds. That did not happen. In 2020, however, I was investigated for blocking Toni’s access to funding for her projects with the Innerlight Sanctuary. The college found that I violated the faculty code of conduct and sanctioned me. The particular act for which I was sanctioned was my refusal to schedule a second emergency meeting for Toni to request money for her Level III training after she missed the first emergency meeting that I scheduled for her. For reasons that I still do not understand, the college called my refusal an act of retaliation. (In 2022, the California Superior Court found that the college did not have evidence of retaliation.)
How does an organization deal with lies? In a well-organized liberal arts college that abided by its processes, there would be no problem. Some professors, following the lure of their intellectual passions, would unfortunately be ensnared by fakers like Elliott. Other professors would see the obvious fakery and not fund it.