So I don't really think my account is all that necessary to read if you read all the others, but I will do my best to make mine a bit more hilarious since that's my bag and I wasn't necessarily scarred by what happened since I wasn't at Mogadao for very long, though I did get to know many of the victims well in the aftermath.  But just to be clear: Daniel Villasenor/Zhenzan Dao/Zhenevere Sophia Dao is a scary ass person and someone needs to do that binding spell that they do on Nancy in the original "The Craft" because she is serving major crazy manipulation vibes.

 Part 1: Before I realized Mogadao Is a Cult

At the beginning of 2019 I decided to fly to Tulum to hang out cuz I had been there 2 years before and loved it and wanted to be somewhere tropical for a second.  While I was there, one night, I found myself listening to this podcast featuring this lady named Zhenzan Dao (originally named Daniel Villasenor, now calling herself Zhenevere Sophia Dao, soon to be something else I'm sure).  I was totally obsessed because she combines a number of different eastern energetic and sexual healing practices into one and is a really great speaker.

For the next couple months I debated going to study with her in Santa Fe, and at the end of 2019 she announced that she was going to basically stop teaching except for a 3 month period at the beginning of each year, so I decided I was going to put my life on pause to go and do the training.  Little did I know that she is *always* changing everything about the structure of her teachings, what's required to become certified under her, on top of changing her name and gender.

I decided to visit for a couple days in November to see if it felt right.  What was supposed to be a training that went into all the different facets of the upcoming program turned into a yoga focused program a week before I got there, which I didn't mind so much, but it was my first taste of the abrupt changes to the teachings and schedule that I was subsequently informed happened all the time.

I was joined at the training by a friend from San Francisco who was incredibly skeptical of the teacher while I felt trusting.  We talked about it a lot and while this person was admittedly more generally skeptical of lots of things, there seemed to be something very real about his concern that I never entirely dismissed.

During this time, I had worked out a deal with a friend where I would be able to use their car, but by the end of the trip the car's emergency lights came on, and by the following month was entirely dead, so my ability to get around Santa Fe went out the window.  What I thought was going to be an easy and enjoyable experience was becoming more difficult as things progressed.  Those emergency lights weren't just about my car babes, TRUST.

It was a really big decision and I had to put a LOT on hold to prepare for it.  But I was still excited to go back to Santa Fe, where I went to college, and where so many of my friends were.  My 4 best friends from college (I'm a Taurus so I can have a lot of best friends and not feel weird about it) had all recently moved back, so it felt like a great time to go and spend time there.  I even got there a month early, in December, so I could take some of the individual classes that she was teaching before only offering the three month program.

During that month, where I cat sat for this cat that was like 20 years old and moaned all throughout the night because it had kidney problems which I personally thought were promulgated by the old lady living there keeping the house freezing to save money, I ended up never going to any classes except for one which wasn't even taught by Zhen.  I was there to go to these classes but every morning when I woke up and was supposed to go I just didn't.  Now I'm grateful I didn't give her any more money than I already had.

I flew home to Boston and NYC for Christmas and New Years which was nice because I got to have sex before committing to what I believed would be 3 months of cellibacy because a big part of the training was going to be about abstaining from having ejaculatory orgasms, and Santa Fe is pretty much a wasteland of potential gay partnership, for me personally at least.

I flew back in mid January and the first couple days of class were pretty normal to me.  I began to hear rumblings of something happening only a couple days into it, but I didn't really know any of the people involved.  Which was one of the weird things about the school in general, that there wasn't really any facilitated introductions to other people.  I naturally introduced myself to lots of peeps but if you were more of an introvert, you probably had no way of really connecting with people or knowing who they were and what they were about.  For a program that is so unique, you would assume that people would be excited to get to know each other and hang out, but that wasn't really the case.

But of course there were all these little weird things.  At one point we were talking about destiny and this young guy raises his hand and was like "I just got the most amazing job opportunity of my life but I'd have to leave here to take it" and the teacher didn't even ASK what the opportunity was and instead just said "you need to stay in this program".  The teacher positions things such that they make you believe they do no advertising on principle as an anti-capitalist, but you have to realize that this makes people who find it feel special and lucky, and helps to make them more loyal, psychologically and financially, and this particular instance helped me to see that the fear of losing this person's financial support trumped the ethics of helping this person to make the decision that might ultimately be best for them.

Pretty much everyone was always late coming back from bathroom breaks or lunch breaks, but the only time she ever reprimanded anyone was the time when her romantic partner of 10 years came late.  Out of nowhere, as her partner was walking in the door, she screamed "You are not allowed into the space, you have to stay in the foyer".  I don't know about you, but if I had a partner of 10+ years, a. that would never happen and b. if on some strange planet it did happen, it wouldn't happen in the way it did.  It felt like such a subtle and strange grab for power, perhaps something that wouldn't be admissable in court as evidence, but nonetheless strange and indicative of something strange to me in the moment, and which I know with 100% certainty would be cause for me to tell them to go get fucked.

But that wouldn't happen in this space because it wasn't playful and it was clear that she expected a high degree of submission.  The teacher gets playful every once in a while for sure, but it's her show, not anyone else's, and it's clear that to get her approval you need to play the poet-intellectual flute as much as you can as proof of your identification with her.  She *clearly* played favorites, which bred a lot of competition for her affection and praise, and I think helped to mold people into her likeness and get people psychologically invested in her love.  There was quite literally never a moment where one of her assistants wasn't vying for her attention and everything was about doing things *exactly* as she did them even though she was *always* changing, and it felt very, very clear that you were not meant to experiment or improve upon her forms, postures or teachings in any way, even though she herself was making them up out of nowhere.  One of her teachers, who has since been removed from her site, was not crediting Zhen properly and Zhen had her right-hand assistant pay to take her course without her knowing so she could find out what she was doing against her wishes.

Speaking of her right hand assistant, I did not know this woman well, but what I do know is that she worked for another organization that is also well-known for taking advantage of their workers and employees and that was also started by not exactly a cult leader but a really whacked out new-agey spiritual tall-tale spinner, a fact which made me slightly weary of her from the start.  Working for this other shitty org was the assistant's only source of income, and only required a few months of work a year, but Zhen asked her to quit it in order to facilitate Zhen's theatrical production, for which no one was going to be paid despite working on the project full-time.  Yes party people, you heard correct.  FULL TIME w/ ZERO PAY. 

If I remember correctly I was told the assistant was crying before quitting her job, and told everyone including Zhen afterwards that she felt really sick.  I imagine Zhen may have promised these people the moon and stars, as she once said they were going to rent out a theater for a night in Santa Fe, but Zhen probably doesn't even know what a GIF is so the idea of her putting any kind of marketing together to promote it is insane, and a one night performance in Santa Fe will net you about enough to pay for the raw material to make 6 balloon animals.  They performed it once at an event in California (which upwards of 9 people had to pay their way to get to) that half the audience literally walked out on.  Word on the street is that the assistant has now fallen prey to the same exact romantic gaslighting that so many other women did, though it's unfortunately hard to feel any sympathy for her when she helped Zhen get away with it with other women, and may very well go back to her after all is said and done.

 
Similarly - and these particular stories are the most heartbreaking to me personally, besides the story where Zhen's neglected dog was hit by a car - one of Zhen's other assistant's fathers was dying during the production of the play, and when she talked to Zhen about going to see him on his deathbed, Zhen responded by saying "How close were you, really?".  She did not go to see him and he died without her having a chance to say goodbye.  She cried in my presence multiple times saying she'd regret it for the rest of her life. 

Of course, cults being what they are, this woman still decided to stay at Mogadao after all this, though I'm not sure whether or not she's still a part of it.  She was one of my favorite people I met there, and I sincerely hope she reads everything here.  But this wasn't the only story that ended like this.  Another elderly woman attending our trainings' best friend of over 40 years if I remember correctly also died right at the beginning of it and she decided not to fly back for the funeral.  I don't know whether or not Zhen convinced her not to go so I shouldn't speculate, but let me make something real clear:  If my best friends don't go to my fucking funeral, I'm gonna haunt ALL y'allz asses.