New Age retreats that offer experiences purporting to be vision quests, sweat lodges, and shamanic initiations, usually lasting a weekend or a week, are also popular. In October 2009, during a New Age retreat organized by motivational speaker and former telemarketer, James Arthur Ray, three people died and 21 more became ill while participating in an overcrowded and improperly set up heat endurance experience, advertised as a "Spiritual Warrior" sweat lodge ceremony, led by Ray. The nontraditional structure contained some 60 people and was located at a new age retreat center called Angel Valley, near Sedona, Arizona; participants paid approximately $10,000 per person to attend. In 2011, Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide. Spiritual leaders in Indian Country spoke out against these experiences led by untrained, unqualified people, clarifying that "the ceremony which he was selling bore little if any resemblance to an actual sweat lodge ceremony.""Native History: A Non-Traditional Sweat Leads to Three Deaths." Indian Country Today. 8 Oct 2013. Accessed 24 May 2021.
