Media Releases

The Lodge: Fall and Rise of a Wellness Cult

Released at 8:00 am on 27 June 2025

Image of a smiling woman with her hands raised in the air in a "praising" style. The words "The Lodge" appear above her hands. Her eyes are covered with a teared page rip across her face and across the image below. There are mountains in the distance behind her. The image is in a purple wash.

Photo: Amrita Marks

It began as a sanctuary for spiritual healing, attracting people from around the world to one of New Zealand’s most remote and beautiful locations. The philosophy taught there has sparked a multi-national wellness business and changed lives... not always for the better. It led to a double tragedy and offers a cautionary tale that goes straight to the heart of the modern wellness industry.

Join award-winning RNZ journalist Phil Vine as he reopens the file on a mysterious cult that operated from a 1960s hunting lodge near Te Anau in the south of the South Island.  An extraordinary place where follower of enigmatic Chinese guru named Aiping Wang came to believe she would give them supernatural powers—the ability to fly, see the future, and heal any disease with “Universe Energy”. 

The podcast traces how, what started in a converted cinema in Slovenia and grew in the forests of New Zealand, has now spawned a global empire of energy healing clinics.

Not just another cult podcast, “The Lodge” provides a chilling view of today’s five-trillion-dollar wellness business. It digs into the controversies of an industry where wellness is just another consumer product and wild promises are made on social media, and where Aiping’s once-fringe ideas about energy healing have become big business.

Through intimate interviews with survivors, heartbroken family members, and cult experts, Vine exposes the devastating human cost of wellness manipulation and lays out the stories of those drawn to a guru they trusted with their lives. Trust that endured ‘til the day they died.
This gripping investigation offers crucial lessons for anyone navigating today’s confusing “wellness” landscape with its promises of short-cuts to health, wealth, and a better you; a place where experts say the line between legitimate wellness practices and dangerous pseudoscience is dangerously blurred.

RNZ’s Executive Editor, Audio Tim Watkin says The Lodge highlights the dark side of the wellness industry. 
 
“The Lodge is a story about the power of belief, the vulnerability of hope, and the urgent need to question who we trust to make us better in an age where anyone can start a YouTube channel claiming to hold the secret to health, wealth and happiness.”

Listen to the first two episodes of The Lodge now at rnz.co.nz/podcasts or on podcast apps, with new episodes out every Tuesday and Friday. Broadcast on Sundays at 7am from 6 July.