Inside Scientology: The "Purification Rundown"

Welcome back to another episode of me realizing I was way more traumatized than I thought! I'm doing much better now, but I've been unpacking a lot of what happened to me, and in doing so it's opened my eyes to all the little big ways I was traumatized along the way.

This week I want to delve into the program they call the "Purification Rundown," and how they go about using it to milk people for all the money they can in the name of "spiritual enlightenment."

Let's get into it.

"This is my third day, how about you?" "Three months and counting."

A Not-So-Quick Rundown

Let's start with the basics, and I'm going to explain this as it was explained to me. Please understand that the nonsense that follows is exactly that.

The Purification Rundown is used at the beginning of "The Bridge" (the Scientology path to spiritual enlightenment through specific drills and processes) to cleanse and ready your body for all the spiritual work you are about to do. According to Scientology, your body holds onto toxins, radiation, drugs, medication, alcohol, all the bad stuff, you hold it all in your fat cells. Things like drugs, alcohol, radiation, they can come back into effect in your body as long as they're stored there, and make you feel like you are under their effects again. So you have to flush them out. You do this by taking vitamins everyday, and taking them in increasing doses, with the focus being on niacin. In large doses, it causes your skin to flush and tingle. They claim that this means it's working, and the red flush is old sunburns and such "running out." Yes, I believed this, let's move past that point.

You start the day by taking your niacin right away, and noting down the time. Because for the next five hours of the day, you are on "the purif." As soon as it's down, you have to run on the treadmill for half an hour, because this "activates" the niacin by getting your blood pumping so it goes through your system faster.

As soon as that half hour is up, directly into the sauna with you. Because yes, you now need to remain in the sauna, and sweat as much as possible, for the next four and a half hours. You're obviously not allowed to hurt yourself and overheat, they can't afford the lawsuits, so you have to take breaks and jump in the shower or cool down however possible until you feel okay. Then right back into the sauna.

This all happens in a little self-contained area within the church, it has separate bathrooms and showers for men and women, but typically there's only one sauna for everyone. There is always at least one person there watching over everyone, who is "trained" in how to run a purif, making sure that they all take their vitamins throughout the day, and that everyone is eating enough vegetables and drinking their water. It's all heavily monitored, you even need to get a doctor to sign off on you doing it before you're allowed to start. You're not supposed to gain or lose any weight, you weigh yourself every day and add it to your daily report. It's all about flushing the "old fat" out of your system, and then replacing it with "good fat." Along with the vitamins, you need to take a shot of oil (I forget the exact kind now, but I remember it being nutty) and a tablespoon of lecithin; those are the "good fats."

This doesn't just go on for a day or two. You start with a small amount of niacin on day one, and keep taking that same amount every day until your mind and body stop "reacting." Meaning you can't feel sick at all, have your skin flush, have memories or emotions coming up, anything that could be deemed a "reaction," because that means your body is running out some drugs or radiation etc. Once you go through a day with no reaction, your amount of niacin moves up, and all the other vitamins move up accordingly as well. By the end, you are taking fistfuls of vitamins in a day. I can't remember where you start, but I want to say 100mg of niacin. But I definitely remember how high you go. Because this number becomes emblazoned in your brain when you're on the purif.

5000 mg of niacin.

It can take you months to get there.

And I did it five times, that I can remember.

Five. Times.

The Ugly Truth About Scientology

Let's get right into it. He obviously ripped this off from Native tribes and their sweat lodges. This is only one of the many ways that Scientology is blatantly racist, and Hubbard has done the basic white dude thing and stolen something from another culture, slapped a coat of white paint over it and called it their own. But I digress.

The purif is used in a few different ways that have nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment.

We'll start with their worst offense, in my opinion. Scientology has Narconon rehab centers all over the world. They get people at their weakest points, and they indoctrinate them. They are made to do the full purification rundown, which can take them even longer since they are actively coming off of hard drugs and alcohol, as well as other Scientology processes called "TRs" or "Training Routines" that I will delve deeper into in another post, but I have mentioned them before. Remember the drill I had to do where I sat and stared at another person without moving an inch for two hours straight? That's one of them.

They bring in people who are struggling in life (remember: addiction is a symptom not a cause) and they get them into a solid schedule with healthy food and rest for the first time possibly ever in their lives. They force them into situations where they are going to experience weird body effects, tell them lies about why it's happening, and attribute all success to Scientology and all failures back onto the person themselves. And then, once they start to feel better (thanks to sobering up and a healthy lifestyle) they shove them down the pipeline into Scientology proper, typically by getting them to join staff. That's how my ex husband got involved.

That alone is a sick and twisted process. It has nothing to do with wanting to help people, and everything to do with knowingly exploiting the weak and vulnerable, and slapping a top shelf price tag on it to make it look legitimate.

But this isn't the only way they use this "tool" of theirs.

The Purification Rundown is their basic gateway for so many new people. It costs thousands of dollars, so it's a perfect way to determine if a person has enough money to make them a great target to keep squeezing money from in the future. Or, if they can't afford it, you can convince them to join staff so they can do it for free.

Being healthy is very "in" right now, so it's a perfect stepping stone for new people. You don't have to get into everything else, you sell them on a sauna treatment to get rid of toxins. It's brilliant, unfortunately. I saw so many new people start on the purif with no real idea of what exactly they were getting into. Then once you start, things do start to happen. Go pick up a bottle of niacin from the pharmacy, it's a basic vitamin, it's even in cereal. Take a couple, then have a sip of alcohol, or run around the block. Your skin is going to flush, your face is going to feel hot and tingly. It does happen, and it has nothing to do with your "toxins." But of course, that's not what they tell you. There is some required reading that comes along with the purif, so while you sweat, you indoctrinate yourself. You learn all about the "research" Hubbard did, and how these toxins are stored, and how he figured out this "science" to rid yourself of their negative effects.

And then... You start to feel better. It's like the euphoria that comes along with leaving a terrible job or a relationship. The ecstasy of no longer feeling the pain can completely change how you see what was happening. Now, it was all "for a reason." Look how much better you feel! It must be because of Scientology, not the fact that you were being physically active, eating healthy, and taking large amounts of vitamins for weeks on end. Nope, it's definitely thanks to the insane ramblings of a below-average white man. Oftentimes, you finish feeling worse than when you started. But you're so damn happy that it's over, your brain will trick you into thinking that you feel better, just so you don't have to do it anymore.

By this point, it's usually too late to see reason. This process takes weeks, and you're surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing. You develop a sense of community; and some of them have been around for a long time. They tell you stories about the old days and all they've learned along the way... It all becomes normalized. They have graduation night on Fridays, and since you're probably still in the building, you go along to that. You eat good food and watch people talk about the amazing week they had, and how much better they feel. You hear from other people who have finished the purif and other rundowns, and hear about their massive wins and realizations. Before you know it, you're cheering right along with them.

This is just one of the many routes into Scientology they have out there. But this isn't the only way that they use the Purification Rundown.

Time to go back in the box

Purif or Punishment?

As I mentioned above, I didn't just do this one time. One idea that they start to introduce during the purif is the concept of past lives. To each their own, I do still like to believe in reincarnation, but they take it to a whole other level. A lot of weird things can happen while you're sitting in a sauna for five hours a day, flying high off of ungodly amounts of vitamins. You can start to see things, people have re-experienced full blown acid trips, there are lots of crazy purif stories. Sometimes you'll get weird flushes or reactions that don't make sense for anything you've done in this lifetime, and it will be suggested that it's something from a past life. They claim that doing the purif can run out drugs and radiation that you experienced lifetimes ago.

So, if it's that powerful... why would a person ever have to do it again?

Oh, let me count the ways.

One important thing to know about Scientology is that they love their money, and they are constantly coming up with new ways to take more of it from you. Some time after I finished my first purif, they had some big "release" wherein they had re-worked all of the technology (the processes and courses, etc.) to be "closer to what Ron had envisioned" or some such nonsense. What that basically meant was that everything that everyone had done prior to this new release was no longer valid. All qualifications, completions, all of it. Null and void. Everyone had to start over from the bottom, and pay for it all over again.

After my second purif in Alberta, I was sent down to Kentucky to train to be an auditor. They went over all of the reports from that purif, and deemed that it was not done correctly. So, back "in the box" I went. It had been less than 6 months since my last purif. The first one had taken place less than 4 years before that one. Yes, that's 3 purifs in 4 years.

A couple of years went by, and the church I was working for was getting desperate to get their "stats" up. Meaning, they needed to get more people paying to go onto the Purification Rundown and other services. So, they started getting the public Scientologists (people who were not on staff, but had a lot of money) to pay for the staff members to do services, even though they were supposed to be free for staff. They called them "donations." Staff pay was based on how much money was brought in every week. This means that in order for the staff to be paid, sometimes we needed the public to make donations that went towards paying for staff to be on services that were supposed to be free if you were on staff. Sounds like a weird Ponzi Scheme doesn't it? Exactly.

So it was decided that I needed to do the purif again. The reason being that the couple of drinks I had had here and there on the weekends were "too much," so clearly I needed to run out "hundreds of years" of toxins again.

So back in the box I went! That was my fourth purif. Then, only a few months after I had finished that one, it was decided that I needed to go back in yet again. I don't even remember what nonsense they deemed made it necessary that time, but there was a definite trend of anyone who dared to start asking questions wound up back on the purif.

It was constantly being used as a form of punishment. Anytime a person started to step out of line, they would be sent in for what Scientology calls a "security check." An auditor, the job I had, would spend hours on hours, days on days, weeks on weeks even, interrogating a person and getting them to fess up to anything and everything. And most people in Scientology enjoyed a drink from time to time, go figure. This shouldn't be anything to feel guilty about, but when you're hooked up to a machine for days on end, being asked question after question specifically about drinking alcohol, you're going to fess up to every single drink you've ever had just to make it stop.

Once the auditor is done with the interrogation, they write up every offense, and send it off to the Ethics Department. Think about every drink you've had in the last year. Even if it's just once a week, written down on paper it can look like a lot. At this stage of the security check, or "Sec Check," you have to do a variety of things to make amends for all of your wrong doings. If having a few drinks made its way onto that report, that was a perfect excuse to send somebody off to do the purif again. Just make sure that somebody will pay for it first, or else it doesn't count.

It's a constant cycle; no one does the purif only once if they stick around long enough. I don't know what the bodily ramifications can be from doing it so many times so close together, but I'm not unconvinced that a large part of the problems with my stomach these last few years have come from having my body subjected to that "rundown" so many times in a row.

The very last purif I did, I had to end while still "reacting" because I couldn't stop throwing up for days on end, my head felt like it was splitting in two, I was miserable. So it was deemed that I had gone past the point when I should have ended, what they call an "overrun," so I was taken off of it. My stomach never fully recovered, I realized the other day that it's now been a month or two since I've thrown up. That's a record stretch since that last purif.

Me every time I smell a B vitamin now

Let's Wrap It Up

In a nutshell... Scientology is really good at using their money to make it look like they are a professional operation. They are not. They are really good at PR, and they operate like a well-oiled machine.

The only thing we can do is continue to spread awareness. If people stop joining, eventually they will die off. The only reason I joined is because the only negative things I had heard about them was Tom Cruise jumping on a couch, and that was easily explained away as something silly. Not anything dangerous.

But they are dangerous, and people need to know that.

Thank you all so much for all of your support 🫶🏻 Don't forget to follow me on all the socials, I'm @beccascorneroftheworld everywhere. I've started recording these blogs into weekly podcasts as well, currently on YouTube, but I'm also working on getting a Patreon set up! The bare-bones beginning is over there now, but I'll have private live streams and watch parties available soon! I'm gonna do what I can, when I can. Thank you all again for giving me the strength to keep going, you have no idea 🖤