Costa Rica-based “Natureboy” Cult Has Canadian Family Worried About Daughter’s Safety
The Costa Rica Star/March 20, 2017
By Wendy Anders
Friday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) published an article on a 21-year-old woman from Corner Brook, Newfoundland who was declared missing by her family in early March.
After the young woman, Kayla Jean Reid, had allegedly gone to a church retreat at the end of February and never returned home, her family contacted the Newfoundland police. As her family scoured the Internet for possible news of their daughter, they spotted her in a video published by Natureboy Reflection on his Facebook site, said the CBC news report.
Her family was able to reach Kayla at the Natureboy center in Costa Rica, but said the phone call left them feeling unsettled, as if she had been brainwashed and was being told what to say to her family by Natureboy, which made them concerned for her health and safety. Once her family located her, Newfoundland police called off the missing person search, said CBC.
There is no information on Facebook regarding the specific location or details of Natureboy’s operations in Costa Rica, though his site invites one and all to move to Costa Rica and discover their true selves through contact with nature.
The Facebook site is run by a black man of undeclared nationality by the name of Eligio Bishop.
Bishop’s Facebook page has over 17,000 followers, and he professes a new-age type of philosophy that claims returning to nature is the path to finding one’s own power, and employs biologistic and pseudo-scientific phrases relating to cells and the immune system.
The philosophy has racial elements that are reflected in statements on the Natureboy Reflection’s Facebook site such as this:
“We are all cellfs living inside of the black woman’s body. I am the black woman. I am her consciousness playing out as the immune system here to activate the other cellfs to get in tune with the body. Eligio Bishop Natureboy Reflection”
And the philoshopy appears to include a megalomaniacal dimension reflected in statements such as:
“You can’t be God if you can’t be human. Get back to nature. ~Natureboy Reflection”
The name Natureboy appears to hearken to a song first recorded by American jazz singer Nat King Cole and released on March 29, 1948 as a single by Capitol Records, according to Wikipedia.
“The song was written in 1947 by eden ahbez and is partly autobiographical. It is a tribute to ahbez’s mentor Bill Pester, who had originally introduced him to Naturmensch and Lebensreform philosophies, which ahbez practised,” continued Wikipedia.
The namesake is apt, given that the song expresses ahbez’ connection to movements that profess radical beliefs centered around a return to nature:
“Lebensreform (“life reform”) was a social movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing among others health food/raw food/organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform and at the same time abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines,” says Wikipedia.
One line of the song, “There was a boy, A very strange, enchanted boy, They say he wandered very far, Very far, over land and sea,” could be something that motivated Eligio Bishop to travel to Costa Rica to form the movement he is now leading.
The Costa Rica Star has requested information from local police to better understand Natureboy’s operation and information will be published if and when it becomes available.
In the meantime, if you have any information on the Natureboy location or operations in Costa Rica, feel free to contact us.
Kayla is reported to have published a video on social media over the weekend stating she planned to stay at the Natureboy center. Her family is very distraught, reported local Canadian media.