I received an email from someone who said that they recently came across an open letter on the website derelify.com written by a long-time student of Alan Wallace’s who recently left the community. The letter goes into some detail on why he left, and along with the email sender, I think his story is credible and deserves a wider audience.
Here’s another open letter from someone else about the same thing: https://carmenmaria.me/#personalreflections
And here’s Tenpel’s take. He includes a section on the approach Alan is taking with his emphasis on ‘achieving shamata’ which is exactly what I thought when I read about this retreat and its focus. I recommend reading it. https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2026/05/05/world-class-training-via-email-a-former-devotee-of-b-alan-wallace-speaks-out/
I did an internet search on Alan Wallace, and all I saw were good things about him. I am sharing the link to this open letter because it is in the public interest. I believe that people investigating potential teachers need information that allows them to see beneath the surface.
I do not know the authors of these letters, but I know how much it takes for long-term students to leave a teacher and how much harder than that it is for them to publish a criticism. It is never done lightly, so I urge anyone considering taking the retreat to which the author refers to consider both these letters as important information to take into account.
Knowledge of the dharma by itself does not make a good teacher, and neglect comes in many forms.
If anyone else has any additional insights into this matter, please comment below. You can do so anonymously and though you need to provide an email address to post, I would never share that email address with anyone.
There’s been a lot of critical comment re Alan Wallace recently. Tenpel’s blog for example. I would be very wary of any form of commitment to him.
If you’re running a retreat, you should be hands on and available to the retreatants. That he isn’t available and isn’t able to handle the issues they’re having is enough for me to put him in the ‘teacher best avoided’ basket.
Total agree! Availability at the very least, but available both physically and emotionally. I think Alan may find it hard to connect emotionally with others, not just his students.
Yes indeed. I entirely agree. BTW the link you posted doesn’t work.
https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2026/05/05/world-class-training-via-email-a-former-devotee-of-b-alan-wallace-speaks-out/
I know Terran personally and know his story in quite some depth, as I spoke with him several times after he published his letter. I have been knowing Terran since 2015. I also have been a close student of Alan Wallace, and now would not recommend him if someone wanted to enter longterm retreat under his guidance. The way he threatened Terran with samaya breakages impacted me deeply, and I can understand now how he wants to keep his authority unchallenged. This guru model, when exploited in the way Alan does, is so outdated, it keeps creating so much harm. Please do not share my email address 🙏♥️
Thank you for your comment. It’s good that people have many voices to hear from about these things. Don’t worry, I will not reveal your email address.
Claudio,
I’m very curious to know, given how close you were to Alan as a student, if there were red flags you can now look back on that might have given you pause? Same goes for Eva? Were you shocked by the contents of both Terran’s and Carmen’s open letters? Or
Dear Louis, I wasn’t shocked when I read Carmen and Terran’s accounts. Rather, they clarified what had been in my mind for a long time. There were indeed red flags in my encounters with Alan; probably one of the strongest was that our dialogues were mainly a one-way monologue in which I was only the receiver. There was no real dialogue ever. I’ve tried for years to do what Alan emphasized so much, namely achieving Shamatha, and I almost destroyed my life in the process, but the aim was so lofty that real world issues, for example with money, a roof over your head, and a job never counted. I don’t know Eva very well, so I can’t say. But regarding Alan, what I keep feeling is his distance from people, and his frenetic energy. Unfortunately, I was blinded by devotion to him, believing he was acting having everyone’s best interests in mind, so any red flag was always dismissed. Another one that was plainly weird was when he asked me to tie his shoes during a retreat. I did it immediately, and I wonder why he asked me to do such a thing. His authority felt unquestionable too.
Thank you, Claudio, for supporting Terran with your comment here!
Many of us witnessed a serious shift when a group of fervent Michael Roach followers gathered around Alan and began elevating him in an extreme, almost godlike way. For those unfamiliar, Michael Roach is a highly controversial Buddhist teacher whose community has long been associated with serious ethical concerns and troubling outcomes.
From that point on, long-term students who had been close to Alan for years either left, were sidelined, or were pushed out.
The same pattern appeared around the CCR project. People who had devoted years of volunteer work, financial support, and sincere commitment to Alan’s vision in Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and Santa Barbara were gradually neglected and replaced, while a new inner circle consolidated power around him.
What emerged no longer resembled a healthy spiritual community, but a closed circle built on adoration, control, fundraising, and exclusion. This group constantly praised one another, controlled access to Alan, and helped normalize behavior that many students found deeply troubling, including his rage, grandiosity, and increasingly authoritarian attitude.
At the same time, Doug Veenhoff and Eva Natanya continued teaching at centers associated with Michael Roach, which for many people only deepened concerns about the direction of the community.
Many people also felt uncomfortable watching Eva publicly revere Alan in exaggerated ways, including referring to him as Padmasambhava. That kind of public veneration only deepened the sense that the community was moving away from grounded spiritual practice and toward personality worship.
Alan was not like this before. Over time, he seemed to become more aloof, more self-important, more publicly flirtatious with Eva, more insistent that students call him “Lama la,” and more prone to angry outbursts that felt arbitrary and disturbing.
Many of us have watched this unfold in disbelief. What is happening now looks less like a genuine dharma community and more like a cult.
That is definitely a cult. It also shows how easy it is for people who perhaps start out as a teacher with good intentions can be corrupted by student adoration. Cults are the result of dynamics that evolve around distorted sense of devotion and this is certainly it. Unfortunately Tibetan Buddhist teachings on teacher devotion lend themselves to this kind of development. This makes it all the more important that teachers themselves see the danger and actively steer students away from this kind of excessive devotion – but I guess having people idolising you is alluring for one’s ego.
Miserere. ..
All too familiar. Both Tahlia and I have books published about the cult of Sogyal. Depressing to see that apparently nothing has been learned from the catastrophic conditions that arose around Sogyal’s massive ego , which was nurtured by the adulation accorded to him by his western sangha. The great Tibetan Buddhist sages warned against this potential, but were largely ignored. Too many needy people too eager to part with their money. Far too much influence from the inner circle acolytes. One figurehead way out of his depth . Never trained as a lama. Recipe for disaster, which happened on a grand scale. Seems likely that similar circumstances are developing around Alan Wallace.
I think this kind of thing will happen anywhere that people give uncompromising devotion to someone. And in a religious setting where devotion is encouraged, the chances are even higher, especiallyif that person had narcissistic tendencies. It’s just too easy for humans to be corrupted by the adoration of others. Spiritual teachers are not immune, but we think they should be, so we ignore it until we no longer can. And then the disappointment and sense of betrayal- as I describe in Fallout – is life shattering. However it is also liberating because our paths only get stuck if we stay with one guru. We have to graduate.
Anonymous,
Your personal observations around the dark impact followers of Roach had on the community of students devoted to Alan and later, and later had on the Shamatha Project, are very helpful in helping us understand how things went off the rails there. It almost sounds like a kind of coup! The slow takeover of the community by a group of outsiders imbued with values that were deleterious to the health of the community. And what is most sad, Alan was one of the first victims, vulnerable to the adoration and blinded by it.
How long did it take for these changes to occur? It appears the impact was almost immediate, as was the fallout with long-term students leaving, sidelined, or pushed out.
To those following the recent accounts about Lama Alan and the Center for Contemplative Research:
We are a number of people who have studied with Lama Alan and practised at the CCR, some of us for the better part of twenty years. We’ve read the letters and comments now circulating, and we want to add a perspective that the current conversation is missing.
First, plainly: we don’t doubt that those who have written feel real pain, and we have no wish to argue anyone out of their own experience. Intensive, open-ended retreat can be destabilising — it is meant to bring up what is usually kept at bay, and that can be very hard. None of us would want anyone’s distress dismissed.
But the picture taking shape online is one-sided, and many of us have lived something quite different. In our own experience, across many group retreats, solo retreats, and visits, both elsewhere and at CCR, what we encountered is warmth, humility, and care.
Those of us who have been with Lama Alan one to one, or spent months at CCR, met a community that was kind and supportive and a teacher who has given of his time for many, many years and notably without self-importance. Both publicly and behind closed doors, we’ve seen him always put himself down and make no claims of any kind. We’ve witnessed in him his profound equanimity: the capacity to remain balanced, neither attracted nor repelled, when showered with praise or given a gift, and even when facing misrepresentation or ingratitude.
During our own retreats and times at CCR and elsewhere, we’ve had opportunities for guidance from the teachers, via email and in person, offered to us. And then, for psychological support, it has always been a major part of Lama Alan’s retreats. Those who’ve joined the yearly two-month retreats will be well aware of this. In our retreats, we were told who the qualified psychologists available at CCR were, how we could reach them in person, online, via WhatsApp, or email. This support was offered freely. For us, support was never hidden, discouraged, or difficult to access.
It bears emphasising: a Lama’s teaching methods, whether through instruction, interaction, or even silence, are not psychotherapy, nor are they meant to be. These are distinct modalities with different purposes and ethical frameworks. Lama Alan has consistently honoured this distinction, demonstrating exceptional ethical awareness, humility, and kindness to us, even when we faltered, doubted, or got things wrong, we were met with patience.
That has been the consistency of our years and experience with Lama Alan. There have been mentions in these comments of episodes of rage and anger. Lama Alan may need to be a bit sharp at times (of course, every Lama may need to employ different approaches in guiding their students, and we must acknowledge the complexity of the student-teacher relationship), but we have never personally witnessed episodes of rage or anger.
We also want to speak to the word “cult,” because it’s a serious charge. We understand why intensive practice and a close-knit community can look that way from outside. But it does not match what we have experienced: people arrive and leave freely, ask hard questions, disagree, and go on with their lives. Calling it a cult unfortunately, is a blanket statement that dismisses a lot.
That said, we don’t think every question being raised is unfair. Whether email is enough guidance for long, open-ended retreat, for example, is worth asking honestly, and our guess from their most recent article published a few days ago (and their five-year ‘a taste of what we’ve learned’ article) is that there is a spirit of learning, adaptation and openness to change and grow. That openness is not what we’d expect from the closed system being described. A healthy community like ours should be able to sit with these difficult questions and raise them without treating either side as an enemy or immediately jumping to conclusions and sweeping condemnations.
Mostly we’d offer this: a handful of accounts, however heartfelt and well-written, are still a handful of perspectives among many hundreds of practitioners with very different stories. If you’re weighing whether this path or this place is right for you, please don’t decide from a few letters in either direction. It would be a great shame if decades of sincere work were judged and discredited on the basis of a few accounts, before the fuller picture is even heard.
We’d invite all of us to seek out a range of voices and talk to people directly. We share this not to silence anyone or dismiss anyone’s suffering, but so the conversation has more than one side. We acknowledge that every perspective has a partiality, including ours. Part of this path, as we have come to understand it, is the slow work of honesty — with our teachers, and, more demandingly, with ourselves: are we willing to be vulnerable, to take loving accountability for our own experience, and to engage fully with our teacher’s guidance and instructions, rather than being selective. We say this only of ourselves, and offer it as a question we keep returning to, to develop authenticity and trust in our own practice and in what we all share.
We pray that everyone may be heard, and that harmonious ways forward for the benefit of the dharma and all sentient beings can be found.
— A small group of long-term students and retreatants of Lama Alan
I would like to make four points here: One, I didn’t think I was in a cult while I was in it. Second, just because your experience is one way, doesn’t mean that someone’s else experience in another way is untrue. Three, the numbers are not the point. A good teacher always cares for their students – all of them, all of the time. Four, neglect is not a teaching method.
An effective rebuttal needs to directly address the specific issues raised. Though you write a long and wordy reply, it is one that doesn’t engage any of the highly specific details raised in these accounts, especially things like not helping multiple people being harmed by the practices, some to the point of psychosis or suicidal ideation. If you could address those issues, your rebuttal would be more persuasive.
Wondering who was/were/are ‘Lama Alan’s’ teacher/s?
Anonymous Group above has posted a copy of this on Buddhism Controversy Blog,
https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2026/05/05/world-class-training-via-email-a-former-devotee-of-b-alan-wallace-speaks-out/
Theirs was rely number 25. The blog master replied to it in detail, reply number 26. Worth the read
I tried to watch a YouTube video of Eva Natanya recently. But I had to stop. She is obviously not at peace or at a spiritually healthy state.
Almost radiating with deep anxiety and confusion. She looks like someone who needs saving from a deeply abusive relationship.
I try to never make assumptions or engage in conjecture. These are core principles of how we moderated the original What Now group that inspired this website, and I find them beneficial guides to help keep conversations grounded.