Inside James Arthur Ray’s deadly sweat lodge, 17 years later
Three people died at James Arthur Ray’s 2009 self-help retreat. Annette McGivney spent eight years investigating what happened, why people followed him and what the story looks like now. Her new book, "Plastic Shaman," is out this week.
Matt Stroud talks with journalist Annette McGivney about James Arthur Ray, the 2009 sweat lodge deaths and what she uncovered during eight years of reporting for her new book, Plastic Shaman.
On Oct. 8, 2009, more than 50 people crawled into a low, makeshift dome in the Arizona desert outside Sedona. They sat shoulder to shoulder in darkness around a pit of superheated rocks, near the end of a retreat that had cost them about $10,000 apiece.
The man running the retreat was James Arthur Ray, one of the biggest names in the American self-help business. Ray had appeared in the 2006 phenomenon “The Secret,” promoted it on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and built a multimillion-dollar business around seminars promising wealth, fulfillment and personal transformation.
His five-day Sedona program was called “Spiritual Warrior.” Participants had already spent 36 hours alone in the desert without food or water. The sweat lodge was the finale.
Inside, the heat kept rising. People vomited, lost consciousness and cried for help. By the time emergency crews reached Angel Valley, bodies were scattered around the property. Kirby Brown, 38, and James Shore, 40, died that day. Liz Neuman, 49, died nine days later. Eighteen other participants were hospitalized.
Ray was eventually convicted of three counts of negligent homicide. He went to prison, got out in 2013 and went back into the self-help business. To the families of the people who died, that seemed almost inconceivable.
I started reporting on Ray around the time of his release. My 2013 story for The Verge, “The Death Dealer,” examined the sweat lodge deaths, Ray’s rise and his attempt to rebuild his career. Two years later, I went to one of his comeback seminars outside Phoenix for Bloomberg. In 2020, I hosted Wondery’s “Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment,” a podcast series centered on Ray and the Brown family’s long effort to understand what happened to Kirby.
Annette McGivney kept digging.
McGivney began investigating Ray in 2018. She obtained records from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s investigation, developed relationships with the families of the people who died and spent years with Native Americans who had protested Ray’s appropriation of their spiritual practices. She attended one of Ray’s seminars in Las Vegas in 2019 and watched another online during the pandemic. Her reporting eventually consumed eight years.
The result is “Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America’s Misguided Quest for Wellness,” published Sept. 15 by Torrey House Press. McGivney reconstructs what happened at Angel Valley and asks what made intelligent people surrender so much authority to James Arthur Ray.
That question has bothered me since I first started reporting on him.
McGivney found pieces of the story I never did. She became close to the family of James Shore, the Milwaukee father who died alongside Brown. Her reporting found that Shore had developed buyer’s remorse about attending Spiritual Warrior and tried to cancel his payment. Ray’s organization maintained that he was contractually obligated to pay the roughly $10,000 fee anyway. Shore decided that if he had to pay for it, he might as well go.
She also followed a part of the story that received far less attention in the original coverage. Ray had taken a Native American religious practice, altered it and sold it as part of an expensive commercial self-improvement program. McGivney makes the Native Americans who challenged him central to “Plastic Shaman.”
Ray died in January 2025. He was 67.
McGivney and I talked about what each of us found, what I missed, what kept her reporting for eight years and why the appeal of people like James Arthur Ray has outlasted James Arthur Ray.
Read, listen and watch
Annette McGivney, “Plastic Shaman”
The publisher’s page has ordering information and more on McGivney’s reporting.
Plastic Shaman at Torrey House Press
“Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment”
I hosted the 2020 Wondery series about Ray, the Sedona deaths and the Brown family’s search for answers. The original season has become hard to find in podcast apps, but its IMDb page preserves the series and episode listing.
Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment on IMDb
“The Death Dealer,” The Verge, 2013
My first long investigation of Ray followed his release from prison and return to the self-help business.
Read “The Death Dealer” via Longreads
“Self-Help Author Imprisoned For Sweat Lodge Deaths Is Making a Comeback,” Bloomberg, 2015
I went to one of Ray’s post-prison seminars outside Phoenix to see what his comeback actually looked like.
Read the Bloomberg story
“Enlighten Us: The Rise and Fall of James Arthur Ray”
Jenny Carchman’s documentary follows Ray’s rise, the Sedona deaths and his effort to return to the personal-growth industry after prison. It premiered on CNN in 2016.
CNN Films on Enlighten Us — and Matt's commentary on the film at TheVerge.com
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