(00:01):
Greetings, dear friends. I just woke up this morning after we had a full moon eclipse, a blood moon last night. And I was feeling really weird all yesterday. And I’m not really into astrology, but I read about this particular August full moon eclipse. And they had talked about how you might have some very deep insights and be able to sort of come very clear in a very fast way around patterns that have been holding you back. So karmic stuff just coming to the surface very quickly. So that happened to me yesterday. I was feeling a bit ready to transform. And I had been thinking about an article for my website about looking for green flags within a spiritual community. And so I have been involved with Tibetan tantric Buddhism since I was 19 years old. And I had a long discussion with a Dharma friend yesterday who’s kind of essentially a little bit of a misanthropic, iconoclastic person.
When Spiritual Communities Become Unhealthy
(01:27):
And the two of us have been really hurt by Dharma communities that operate in unhealthy ways, circling around a teacher. And I was also involved with a very large spiritual community here in Boulder. And over the years, once this process with them started to break down- for me, it started in about 2008, 2010 when I was the webmaster for this organization. And they started to make administrative changes that were more insular and more exclusive, like the head teacher would not allow other teachers to come. And then they were having these loyalty requisites that you couldn’t have devotion for other teachers, even is Dad. They were kind of like, you have to be a student of me. And so I started to feel back then, even as the webmaster, that people were leaving and there were some smaller communities being formed of students of his teacher.
(02:32):
And the membership was going down. We were changing the curriculum from a traditional Buddhist curriculum to a new terma called the Way of Shambhala. The organization I was involved with was called Shambhala. And it was more kind of Bon-inspired, sort of this, not really so complicated, more of looking at qualities of animals and then being inspired by animal spirituality and more simple practices, profound and heartfelt. So it was a good curriculum. We had some preliminary practices to do, and they were changing the requisites for having to do a hundred thousand of these preliminary practices to just doing it by time and really connecting to the meaning. So there was a lot that I really supported and I thought it was kind of cool. But this whole loyalty requisite was making me feel really uncomfortable because I had another teacher that was really in my heart, a teacher that I studied with when I lived in Nepal.
(03:43):
So I had kind of both lineages in my heart. I had this teacher and family in Nepal that I was really connected to, and then I had the physical community around another teacher. And I wrote to the director when people were starting to leave their membership and feel estranged and feel that they were kind of like McCarthyism, checking for people’s loyalty. They were literally checking for people’s loyalty. And it made me feel uncomfortable. We all could just tell there’s something unwholesome going on, something not so great at the core. And people kind of rallied around this teacher, a lot of social climbing, a lot of trying to get into his inner court and judgment as to who was who. I was the webmaster and I had a role within the organization that was significant, but I remember coming into the room one day to some teachings with my meditation instructor, who’s this kind of more “spiritually evolved” person in their eyes.
(04:45):
And the two of us walked in together and a person came right up to her and said, “We have a seat for you in the front row.” And I said, “Well, do you have a seat for me?” And he just shook his head. So I’m sent to the back of the bus like Rosa Parks. I’d always not been super cool in the community, no matter how much I gave. I was not a student of his Dad. I didn’t have a particular huge amount of money, and I wasn’t the lover of the current teacher. And I wasn’t even that great of a Dharma teacher. I was a meditation instructor, but they thought I was a little bit too giggly to teach because I would kind of giggle in the middle of my talks. I don’t know. I was just- goofy. So they thought I had to do some work before I could be a teacher.
Hierarchy, Loyalty, and Social Climbing
(05:32):
So I had no real merit. No matter how much of my life I gave, they kind of stamped me as a C-D lister. So it was always about hierarchy and who was close to the teacher. And I always felt that I was there to serve them. I was just sort of this kind of fodder of the 99% to serve the 1%. And then what came out afterwards were these sort of drunken Clockwork Orange nights behind the scenes where people were abused, hurt and forced to strip down, and alcoholism and sex-capades and all this stuff came out, and it was even in the New York Times. And a lot of us went into full-on religious trauma, like a complex post-traumatic stress, they call it CPTSD. And we were processing what was going on. And then there was this high teacher, Dzongsar Khentsye, who wrote something as these teachers were getting exposed.
(06:29):
There was another one from another organization, and he wrote this 20,000-word diatribe about how the teacher falls and you have these tantric commitments to him, you’re kind of bound to these people spiritually, that all the students will go into Vajra hell too. It was this super orthodox Bible-thumper casting of a curse to all of us. And so we lost our teacher. He packed up and left and moved to Nepal. And with his family, we were all left for dead and the community essentially fell apart. They’re still trying to retain some type of community that is not about centering around a king or a teacher, sort of a democratic meditation community, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to recover from all of the scandals that were exposed. So I was right in the middle of this sort of landslide of social stuff and spiritual stuff.
(07:34):
And none of the spiritual teachers really helped us. They were all kind of just toeing the line of if your teacher falls, all of you guys are screwed. So people left. I would say about three quarters of the community left altogether. I went into cult therapy counseling and religious trauma counseling because we were just told that we were in trouble.
And I had two different feelings. One was from the teacher I met in Nepal who was really pure, and there were no scandals and no sex-capades. It was just this simple yogi of love and meditation. Then I had this kind of crazy community of complexity and social climbing and money and power and all this stuff.
“So I had two dichotomous experiences of tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism occur simultaneously. So I had two, one was super ultra pure and beautiful and heartfelt and the most precious thing within me, kind of like meeting Yoda or Obi Wan and meeting the sun, meeting a true Buddha that was the most compassionate, tender, open thing I’ve ever known.”
(08:53):
And he gave me a lot of teachings when I lived over in Nepal for a few years. And then I had this Boulder thing of just this kind of roadkill of pain and deep, deep betrayal where our community, there was talk about people lying in bed in fetal position crying because of the betrayal, not knowing what their lives were anymore. So it just was so incredibly painful for us. And the talk that I had with my friend who’s the iconoclastic misanthrope, but he just said, “I don’t think that we can change Vajrayana Buddhism because it’s structurally flawed when you deify one person and then everyone has to do whatever they say and they have a model of “command and control,” loyalty and pure perception. And then you have vows of silence, secrecy, pure perception, that the architecture of that will lead way to cult-like tenets where people feel that they have to see the teacher as pure, even if he’s not, even if he does things that are hurtful, even if he starts to sleep with everyone or is violent or alcoholic or temper, which a lot of these guys are, not all of them, but some of them are. And you don’t have a democratic voice of power to be able to talk about problems.
Relational Resolution and the Voice of Students
(10:22):
If you were hurt by a Sangha member, if there was some conflict, you are absolutely- part of the cultures unable to discuss that. So this is a really giant red flag. I wound up leaving this community in part and trying to find my place. I’m a web designer and marketer. So I offered my skills to other communities, but I kept seeing the exact same pattern. They would do creepy, hurtful, mean stuff. I would come to them at that point and say, “Hey, the director just yelled at me because I made a mistake and yelled at me at the feast, really mean.” And I would ask for accountability and resolve, and the teachers would just ignore me or the board of directors. There’d be absolutely no place to be heard and to be valued and to talk about problems. There’s no format for them in these organizations.
(11:18):
So that’s a huge red flag that they don’t have something called relational resolution where the students have a voice. You are kind of like sock in your mouth, suppressed by the thought of pure perception, and you’re not allowed to question anything. You’re not allowed to talk bad about Dharma Brothers and Sisters or, God forbid, say anything bad about the teacher. Even if he needs help, even if there’s people being hurt. So you’ve got what’s called structural violence. We have situations where the architecture of how these communities are structured are unhealthy, deifying a person, everyone running around. Then they’re stopgapped, told that if they ever leave or even have an errant thought-crime about the teacher community, that they’re Samaya breakers, they’re vow breakers and they’re going to hell. So I know one girl who wanted out of her community down in Crestone, and she’d given a lot over the years and they were treating her in a really bad way.
(12:24):
And she confided in me that she wanted to leave and she thought it was super culty and stuff, but she’s like, “I’m too scared to leave because I’m going to go to Vajra hell.” And they talk about if you leave, you’re going to go to this terrible, loveless, lifeless, hopeless hell after you die. And it’s discussed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So people are really physically spiritually afraid of spiritual repercussions if they ever leave their community or speak out around the problem. So how can you have any type of human community where you are told to suppress problems and you can’t talk about the things that hurt students or women or children? I talk a lot, I started the nonprofit called childsurvivors.com because I found out that there’s worldwide sexual and physical violence amongst the Buddhist monasteries, not just Tibetan, but worldwide. So I’m trying to advocate for safety and child protection.
Child Protection and Accountability
(13:28):
And a lot of people don’t believe me or they think I’m making it up, but there are hundreds and hundreds of corroborated reports of child physical and sexual assault. So I wound up talking with my teacher who I trust and he just said, “Yeah, I agree with you. There are these problems and we’re going to have to make some changes,” but we don’t have a format with which we can change because of the silence, secrecy, secret conduct, peer perception and all of these root downfalls that you can’t actually make it healthy. So what have people done over the past 10 years? I don’t know the statistics, but about 50 to 70% of Vajrayana Buddhists have left, at least Westerners. They’ve just walked away because they saw some of the problems and there’s no way to fix them. So they just left. And that makes me really sad because having met my teacher, there’s so much power and beauty in these practices that it’s such a shame that the institutionalization and organizational tenets are obscuring that dynamic from being able to be propagated and to be healthy and to move forward into the future.
Reforming a Spiritual Tradition
(14:46):
I think I see it fizzling out within one or two generations. So I speak in a way that wants to preserve it, not destroy it, but it has so many structural problems that you just can’t, there’s no way to fix it without a reform. But how do you reform it? Because you’re asking men in power to relinquish power, to stop deifying themselves when they’ve been told that they’re deities ever since they were four years old. So I know one of my teachers, Dr. Nida, said a lot of these Tulkus have to go into therapy and deconstruct and de-indoctrinate because they actually believe that they’re gods and they’re not. They’re still bound by a lot of human ethics, morality, passions and entitlements that can cause unhealthy community. So what do you do? I mean, I haven’t figured out how to resolve it because my heart, I can’t leave my teacher, but I also can’t stay and uphold something that hurts children in monasteries, hurts women by non-consensual sex that exploits students and makes them afraid to not be able to leave.
(16:06):
So I speak of these things with a longing to change, but then when I go into these communities and I see these people kind of like you have got the teacher, then you’ve got their sort of minions of people who think that they’re ordained monks and llamas and stuff and they expect to be exalted and they expect to be Dharma authorities. And then we all have to bow around that person and worship them for some wisdom, which they don’t really have. Most of them are narcissists and they’re unkind fundamentally. They think they’re better than everyone and it’s just a facet of ego. So I try to go into these communities and hang out with them and they kind of look at me with a furrowed brow or ghost me or hurt me. But I feel like what I’m saying is true and maybe that’s what scares them is that the truth speaks loud.
Spiritual Bypassing and Spiritual Narcissism
(16:54):
It echoes like a bell and it shines light onto where people are using the dharma to spiritual bypass or for ego or for nefarious purposes, for covert sexual assault, spiritual narcissism. And disordered people can take positions of power and they seek that out. They seek out kind of exalted titles. So we’ve got a lot of corruption and a lot of problems. And so it’s like what have we become? So I feel that it keeps on hurting me because then I try to ask for accountability and then they hurt me in other ways. I try to talk to the community like, “Wow, you were unkind or you ghosted me or you yelled at me at a board meeting.” I come up with these things that I think are normal ways of communicating when there’s been a problem because problems are inherent to human conflict and human pain and misunderstanding.
(17:51):
And time and time again, I just get absolutely stonewalled or silenced or ghosted or shut up or furrowed brow when I come through. And it’s like, I mean, I go deeply into my practice. I have a lot of devotion. I have a lot of love, forgiveness and real core belief in Buddha nature. But if it’s like my belief in Buddha nature means that we would be able to see and be accountable, learn, grow, change and model these communities in a way that could be more healthy and look for green flags, like relational resolution, a place to come and talk about things in an open way, a place to be able to self-reflect.
And the teachers can pontificate on a big high throne about what we’re doing wrong and all the shadow that we need to see, but what do they say? You can dish it out, but they can’t take their own medicine.
Deifying Teachers and the Loss of Equality
(18:47):
We do not have not permission to say, “I think that you’re drinking too much and you’re sleeping with all your students or you’re threatening us with hell or we need to come down and take you down as you’re not a deity. We’re all kind of more on an eye level and we can work together to create healthy spiritual community in a cooperative way that’s more egalitarian rather than deifying a person.” But in our chants we’re like, I mean, it’s part of the structural problems. It’s like the chants are like thou are the omniscient, all-pervasive knower of the Buddha. I mean, you pray to these people like they’re literal Buddhas and they believe it too because again, they’ve been trained since they were four with this kind of pomposity. And my husband said it’s a little bit like these guys who are in the sports, they’re in college and they just believe they’re little mini gods.
(19:48):
They get worshiped and treated like with a silver spoon and there’s a particular kind of ego that can come from that. And I don’t believe that at the third turning that we ever wanted this kind of grotesque structural organization of institutions. It’s like it was supposed to be a one-on-one yogic ear-whispered lineage of forest yogans and people going deep in a simple way, not this giant monstrosity of a business and money and children and fodder and control and command. And it’s like this giant monstrosity of what we’ve become, which is so different than my understanding of my own simple inward practice and my own inner guru. My teacher died in 1996, but I still supplicate that energy and remember his warmth and it becomes part of the lowest level of my mind, like the most fundamental open space of the mind. And that’s what I train in.
Samaya, Vows, and the Inner Practice
(20:51):
So that’s my commitment. And one of my ethical teachers said that Lamas will use the term Samaya and the vows to keep their community together, but that’s an unethical way of using that. Your vows of introduction to my nature have to do with the simplicity of the inner wakefulness that you train in. It’s not some organizational thing and you’re not going to go to hell. He actually helped me to correct a lot of views of whether or not I’m going to hell. He talked about threefold purity, that there’s no one to be punished and no active punishment and no self. So we deconstructed even the ideological rules of breaking Samaya.
So I had two really, really ethical teachers that did not entrap and exploit their students. So I know a lot of teachers would be mad at me for being some type of hellion or demon or whistleblower because I’m asking for change, but it’s like, do you want to just stay in power and be put up on a throne like from hasenpfeffer Bugs Bunny or do you want to build something that’s going to sustain into the next generations because the next generations are not buying what you’re selling.
A New Model for Buddhist Communities
(22:06):
It is failing, it is waning and we need to do something to fix it. So it would require men in power relinquishing their power and maybe even breaking down a lot of the institutions. I suggest the monasteries change from unsafe same-sex monasteries where children are offered and purchased to parochial schools. So we could create secular parochial schools and maybe they can do a little bit of Dharma training, but the way it is now, it is not safe for them and it is not healthy.
So I have to almost kind of disavow my connection to Buddhism in a structural way, than any of my friends that are going to be mean to me because I’m asking for honesty, kindness, transparency, open dialogue, relational resolution and not deifying a man, but yet the power and efficacy of some of these practices and the yogic stuff and the community that supports that is still valuable to me.
What Is Someone Like Me to Do?
(23:12):
So what is someone like me to do? And I don’t think I’m alone here. It’s just that very few people talk about how they feel that the structural problems have become a hindrance rather than propagating the Dharma. And so I would ask my teachers, if you can come and talk to us every day, all day about what we’re doing wrong- to look at shadow, to uncover deep issues, then I would say, could you also do that and look at the structure of Vajrayana Buddhism, the structure of Tibetan tantra, what we’re doing in these communities and ask, is there anything we could do better? What is the problem of the students? Why have three fourths of the students left? Is it all because we’re so stupid as Westerners and we can’t understand how spiritual you are? I don’t think that’s it. I think that we’re seeing correctly the structural violence and we’re not buying it.
Critical Thinking and Leaving the Matrix
(24:11):
And the people that have stayed now oftentimes are either too scared to leave or the doctrinal delusion has gotten so encoded in their mind that they’ve lost all critical thinking. Because if you have critical thinking, you’re like, I’m not going to let my teacher trap people, threaten them with hell, sleep with everybody, ask for administrative support for free, and then use children to populate their monasteries where they’re being hurt.
So I have to disavow my connection to the structural organizational aspects of what we’ve created now, but then recommit to going deeper into my own practice with my very simple, almost like a forest yogin, forest yogini. That’s where I’m going now and I have to disavow my connection. And I don’t want to even try to show up and have Dharma friends that are still in that matrix of silencem secrecy, unkindness, loyalty and syncophancy, that matrix.
(25:23):
And then also having to bow to these people who are really, really disturbed and propagating in a bastardized version of Buddhism, which is just about tormenting students and trapping them. And I’m hearing suicide attempts, psychological breakdowns from one community in Crestone. This is just really sick and disordered stuff. I can’t ethically support that anymore. So I have to disavow pretty much almost all of my connection with the organized structure of unhealthy community and people using this in a way to be bullies, to be silencing students and to be unkind. I don’t consider myself a whistleblower. I consider myself just a Buddhist who cares about women, children, ethics and doesn’t want to waste my life with some type of crazy organization that exalts disordered people. And then we all group together and then bully people out who are the ones that can see through that process.
Retiring from the Role
(26:38):
And that’s the role I’ve been in for over 10 years now. So I’m retiring from that role as of this last full moon and going really, really deep into my inner practice and inner heart. And I have the essence of my teacher to practice and to remember. And then I have another trusted teacher who actually is able to listen to me and all of us and would consider making some of these changes and that’s a start. So there’s some kind of crack in the matrix that the light can get in and hopefully we can create something healthier. But there are some green flags to look at when you’re wanting to assess an organization and that would be:
- You’d be able to have a voice of change or voice a grievance board.
- You’d be able to have relational resolution.
- You can disagree.
- You could have critical thinking.
Spirituality Versus Religion
(27:43):
I mean, there’s a difference between spirituality, which is a deep internal process of learning, growing. You might come up with something completely different than what’s written in the sutras and tantras. Why can’t you have your own understanding of spirituality? Aren’t we allowed to be spiritual and go deep and find out what’s there? Or do we only have to assume volumes of sutras and tantras and doctrine? And then you either believe it all that’s been spoon-fed to you or you’re an outcast.
I mean, there’s the difference between religion and spirituality. Spirituality allows for open experience, communication, dialogue, depth, and even new ways of seeing things. It can grow. It can grow outside of the structure of its own self. And I think that’s what the Buddha pointed to when he didn’t want us to start a religion or write anything down. He wanted us to go deep.
A New Day Is Dawning
(28:38):
So as far as I’m concerned, today’s the first day where I actually truly vow to become a Buddhist. And that means that I have to disavow everything that we’ve built that is unhealthy, cruel, trapping, fear-based and exploitative. So yeah, I think a new day is dawning.
image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/2101156212/in/photostream/
Suggested Reading
- The Arc of a Crisis: In the Aftermath of Sexual Abuse in Shambhala Buddhism, Holly Gayley
- Buddhist Teachers’ Responses to Sexual Violence: Epistemological Violence in American Buddhism, Ray Buckner
- Reginald A. Ray, Buddhist Saints in India
Google Books: Buddhist Saints in India - Interfaith Reflections- A Buddhist Who Grew Up as An Episcopalian https://somaticsleepcoach.com/posts/interfaith-reflections-a-buddhist-who-grew-up-as-an-episcopalian/
Structural-Dysfunction-in-Vajrayana DOWNLOAD PDF