Category: Abuse in Tibetan Buddhism

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Finding Value and a New Direction in Vajrayana Despite The Failings of Tibetan Buddhism

The Pain of Disillusionment  

One of the hardest things about realising the religious group you’re part of has a dark underbelly is knowing you joined for good reasons. Something called to you. You saw value in the teachings and practices, and that sense wasn’t wrong. There was value. That’s why you stayed so long.  

But then, the lies, manipulation, coercion, and abuse come to light. Even when the truth is exposed for all to see, those running the organisation refuse to change. They won’t admit wrongdoing. Instead, they blame the victims, saying, “What’s wrong is the people who think they’ve been hurt.”  

You can’t stay in a place like that. You can’t stay in a system that apologises not for the abuse but for not warning you it might happen. Abuse should never happen. There’s no excuse for it. Ever.  

So, you leave. But then what?  

Was It All a Farce?  

What about the good you saw? What about what drew you in? Was it all a lie?  

At first, it’s too much to untangle. So, I dropped it all. Let it go. Told myself, “I’m done. Moving on.” And that’s fine. But you don’t move on from the real wisdom you gained. That wisdom has become part of you.  

Genuine wisdom doesn’t come from outside anyway. The teachings reminded you of something you already knew in your bones. The truth of it. The experiences you had that were real and genuine—they stay with you. They’re the value.  

You might try to throw it all away, thinking it’s tainted by the bad, but the wisdom remains. It’s not part of the bad smell. It’s something else entirely.  

Realising the Depth of Transformation  

I always knew I’d gained value from the Tibetan Buddhist teachings and practices, and I don’t include the ones that enable abuse in this-–they are simply unnecessary. But it wasn’t until recently that I realised just how much.  

I was in a group discussing disillusionment, death, and dissolution of the self. People were sharing their experiences, and I just sat there, listening. I didn’t want to speak, which is unusual for me. Sharing my experience and understanding of this topic would have felt uncomfortable.  

Then it hit me: my perspective was so vastly different from theirs. It wasn’t that their experiences were wrong; it’s just that they hadn’t spent three months contemplating death every single day, as I had during my Vajrayana preliminary practice.  

For three months, I focused on the inevitability of death. Not just during the practice itself, but throughout my day. I saw everything through the lens of impermanence. Then, for the next three months, I focused on the preciousness of human life. After that, cause and effect and so on.  

That kind of training changes you. It changes how you see the world. I realised I don’t see life and death the way most people do. I see them as intertwined, inseparable. Being and non-being, Both here with us now. 

The Dichotomy of Tibetan Buddhism  

Here’s the dilemma: Tibetan Buddhism is deeply flawed. Its attitudes towards women, its power structures, and teachings that enable abuse are undeniable. But the practices themselves? They’re incredibly powerful and transformative.  

That’s why people are still drawn to Tibetan Buddhism. The practices work. They change you.  

So what’s the answer for those of us who want that transformative power in our spiritual practice?  

Taking the Gold Without the Dirt  

The answer is awareness. Know the risks. Understand the coercive control lamas can have over students. Recognise when it’s happening and stay away from it.  

You can do the practices and listen to the teachings without surrendering your self-agency. You don’t have to give up your common sense. Surrender isn’t about losing your ethics or sense of right and wrong. It’s about seeing through your false self, your masks.  

The challenge is surrendering what needs to be surrendered while keeping your full agency intact.  

I have found Rob Preece’s books very helpful in reevaluating how I practice Vajrayana too. 

Deity Practices Need Not Be Tainted

What I’ve realised is that the practices themselves don’t need to be tainted by the issues in the religion. They stand alone without a physical guru-–if you don’t associate the deity with a physical teacher. That’s not to say that you don’t need teachings to learn how to do the practices and how they work and what they mean—you do need that at some point—but you can also walk away once you’ve learned what you need to learn. 

Then you don’t need an external lama. The true lama is the nature of mind and reality itself. The physical lama is meant to inspire you to connect with that, but over time, for far too many, that role has been twisted by dominance and abuse. And the teachings that enable that abuse are revered by some simply because some master of the past—who could have been a malignant narcissist-–said it. 

If you focus on the ultimate meaning of lama—the true nature of your mind and reality—you can practise without the taint of a religion that can’t face its own shadow. Luckily for me, I never saw the lama in the practices as the man I later discovered abused people.

But I Can’t Do Those Practices Anymore

Realising this didn’t mean I could turn around and start practicing something like Varjasatttva again. It didn’t mean I could pick up the dakini practice done by the Rigpa sanga and complete my three roots practices. The thought of that alone brings back all the hurt caused by those in that community who allowed their basic human decency to be co-opted by their devotion to a deeply flawed man. 

It brings back all the stories I heard from those who were physically, emotionally, sexually, financially and spiritually abused. And it brings back the depth of  spiritual betrayal I experienced. 

I can appreciate the practices, but I can’t practice any of them. 

I can, however, do a different Vajrayana practice. One untainted by the shadow of Tibetan Buddhism.

A Vajrayana Practice Without the Baggage

I have found a spiritual practice that remains firmly rooted in the authentic core principles of the Vajrayana, but it’s unaligned with any specific teacher and the associated hierarchy and dogma. This one doesn’t retraumatise me. It gives me back what I lost when I stopped practicing what I found a deeply inspiring and supportive form of spiritual practice. And it’s a practice uniquely suited to Westerners and the issues we face in our present world. 

This is the Maha Vajra (goddess of great awareness) practice, and I’ve decided—after a bit of struggle with the idea—to write about the practice and put it into a three-maybe-four book series. 

I’ve renovated and reinvigorated my Substack as the home for that work.

Meet The Renegade Buddhist

The new name for the Substack is The Renegade Buddhist: Developing a psychologically grounded contemplative practice, inspired by Vajrayana.

You know why I’m a renegade. And on top of my willingness to expose abuses within the religion, just doing a non-traditional practice is heresy for those dedicated to the tradition!

I won’t be writing about it here, so if you’d like to follow my journey as I

  • work out what needs to be in the book 
  • deepen my practice  
  • reimagine Vajrayana through the lens of Jungian Psychology 
  • hopefully help others like me in developing a nourishing spiritual practice

please join me there. 

If you’ve ever wanted a Vajrayana practice without hierarchy, superstition, or cultural baggage — one that honours the depth but removes the harm—my Substack publication is for you. 

You can choose from a free or paid option. And the paid option gives us an opportunity to talk deeply and privately on how we will reinvisage Vajrayana for the modern Western world. 

Your involvement at any level—assuming you leave comments and participate in chats—will not only support the book writing, it will also inform how I write about the practice, what resources I find, and what I include in the book. This will make it a better resource for refugees from Tibetan Buddhism who would love a practice without the baggage, and for those new to the spiritual path who are interested in Vajrayana/Tantra but wary of Tibetan Buddhism.  

And just to be clear, here. I am not setting myself up as a teacher. No way would I take on that responsibility! For teachings in the book on principles of Vajrayana, I will be referencing knowledgeable others whose worlds I value. My role is to present the gold and write down the practice I have been given along with instructions for how to practice it. 

I hope I’ll see you there. 

https://tahlianewland.substack.com/subscribe

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Holding Contradictions: Teachers, Abuse, and the Middle Way 

Holding the Middle Way, (C)Tahlia Newland

Yesterday, I came across a comment by Tenzin Peljor on the Beyond the Temple blog that stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, but it hit me deeply because it spoke to something I’ve wrestled with for years. He wrote:  

“As I have learned over the years, qualities and limitations, even profound ones, can coexist. The former do not cancel the latter, nor the latter, the former.”  

It’s such a simple statement, but it carries a weight that can be hard to hold. Especially for those of us who’ve been part of spiritual communities where the teacher—the person we trusted—turned out to have a dark side.  

The Reflex to Reject  

When I first left Rigpa, the Tibetan Buddhist organization led by Sogyal Rinpoche, I felt like my world had split in two. On one side were the profound teachings I’d received— the education on Buddhism in its many facets, careful guidance through practices like shamatha and vipassyana, the glimpses into the nature of mind — and the deep sense of connection to the sangha. On the other side was the undeniable truth of Sogyal’s abuse: the manipulation, the harm he caused to his closest students, and the way the community failed to address it with any kind of integrity or genuine compassion.  

It’s natural, isn’t it, to want to simplify things? To say, “If this person did terrible things, then everything they taught must be terrible too.” It’s easier to reject it all than to sit with the contradictions. But life isn’t that simple.  

The Tension Between Good and Bad  

What Tenzin’s comment reminded me of is how hard it is to hold both truths at once. Sogyal Rinpoche was a deeply flawed, sometimes abusive man. But he was also a teacher who transmitted the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism with care to be true to the lineage. He could click his fingers and shift into a mode where he seemed to channel the wisdom of his own masters. And in those moments, he gave us something real.

But as soon as the teaching ended, he was just … unkind and mentally unstable. A tragic figure who caused profound harm.  

It’s tempting to let one truth cancel out the other. To say, “Because he was abusive, the teachings must be worthless.” Or, conversely, “Because the teachings were so powerful, the abuse must not matter.” But neither of those positions reflect the reality of the situation. Sogyal benefited some and harmed others. Some experienced only harm, others only benefit, some a mix of both.

My Experience of Holding Both  

After the abuse came to light, those of us who left Rigpa faced a difficult task: sifting through the wreckage to figure out what was worth keeping. It wasn’t easy. The good and the bad were both so extreme that it felt almost impossible to hold them together in the same mind.  

And to make it even harder to hold both, sometimes if I said something positive about my experience of having Sogyal as my teacher, others immediately assumed that I thought the abuse was okay. They accused me of apologising for him, which I was not and never have done. His behaviour was inexcusable as far as I’m concerned. And, on the other side, if I expressed my disgust with what he’s done, people assumed that meant that I saw nothing good in my experience at all. 

This is why I haven’t written on this before – and I expect I’ll get some flack for it now. I hope people read it fully and with an open mind before reacting!

Our human minds seem to find it hard to hold both sides of a situation. People immediately want to label you friend of enemy, or a follower of this camp or that. What about holding both sides of a situation without allowing one side to cancel out the other? Isn’t that more in tune with how things actually are?

And isn’t that the middle way? What the Buddha taught. In Buddhist terms, the middle way is about recognizing that though everything is empty of inherent essence, those things also exist. They may not be solid in the way we think they are, but they still function in a world of cause and effect. They have effects. And those effects matter.  

For me, the middle way in this situation means acknowledging that Tibetan Buddhism offers profound benefits—practices like Mahamudra and Dzogchen that can transform lives—but also it carries an enormous risk of manipulation and abuse due to cultural and religious structures left over from feudal times. And neither truth cancels the other.  

Not an Excuse for a Lack of Discernment

I feel I need to clarify another point here as well, and that’s that this idea can be used as an excuse for not discerning right from wrong, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I heard people say – in a very holy manner – that they weren’t making a decision about Sogyal’s abuse, but holding both the possibility that it did and that it didn’t happen. That’s not the middle way, that’s a cop out to absolve you of the moral responsibility of discerning right behaviour from wrong behaviour.

The Buddha was quite clear that his first precept was ‘do no harm’, and clearly Sogyal (and many other lamas) harmed people. Those who found it hard to make that discernment in this religious setting had their moral sense distorted by dogma they subscribed to around the student teacher relationship.

What I’m talking about is knowing that a person caused both harm and benefit, not failing to discern the difference.

And Let’s Not Get the Absolute and Relative Mixed Up

Some will likely say, ‘Oh, but good and bad don’t really exist.’ And if I say, ‘Yes, they do,’ they will likely start spouting dzogchen teachings about going beyond good and bad.

Reality is non-dual, they’ll say. As if that solves everything, including absolving them from making a discernment as to what constitutes right and wrong action. (Remember: the wisdom of discernment is one of the five wisdoms of the nature of mind.)

But I’d ask, Which reality are you talking about, dude?

Yes, I know those teachings, and I know that they refer to absolute reality, not conventional reality. And I know that ultimately those two realities are not separate – the absolute is the true nature of the conventional, sure. But here, I’m talking about conventional reality, where harm and benefit are real experiences, real results of our actions, where cause and effect is in play. We exist – not inherently, sure – but we exist on this physical plain where our actions can cause both benefit and harm.

We live in a dualistic world. That its true nature is non-dual, doesn’t change the fact that our conventional experience is dualistic. There is night and day, a breath in and a breath out, good behaviour and bad behaviour – even if the line between them isn’t always clear and the delineation shifts depending on circumstances.

Watch out for nihilism; it’s more destructive in our material world than eternalism – making abuse acceptable by saying everything is ’empty’ is a prime example.

We exist, and yet we don’t inherently exist. Recognising this is the middle way, holding both at the same time, not using one to negate the other.

And this is the kind of understanding behind Tenzin’s comment: qualities and limitations, even profound ones, can coexist. The former do not cancel the latter, nor the latter, the former.

What I’ve Realised  

Here are a few things I’ve come to understand from all this:  

  • Qualities and limitations can coexist. A person can have profound wisdom and profound flaws at the same time.  
  • Rejecting everything isn’t always the answer. It’s okay to keep the good while letting go of the bad.  
  • Holding contradictions is hard but necessary. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also honest.  
  • The middle way applies to people too. Just as things both exist and don’t exist, the same person can do both good and terrible things.
  • Awareness is key.  Knowing the risks of Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t mean rejecting it entirely—it means approaching it with eyes wide open.  

Does it Matter?  

I think this matters because it’s not just about spiritual teachers or Tibetan Buddhism. It’s about how we deal with contradictions in life. How we make sense of situations that are both beautiful and painful, both inspiring and harmful.  

It’s tempting to simplify, to pick a side, to say, “This was all good” or “This was all bad.” But life rarely works that way. And when we reject complexity, we risk losing something valuable – the truth of how things actually are.

For those of us who’ve been part of spiritual communities, this process of sifting through the good and the bad is deeply personal. It’s not about excusing harm or pretending it didn’t happen. It’s about being honest with ourselves about what we gained and what we lost—and finding a way to move forward. 

An Important Acknowledgement

I acknowledge that for some people, there really was no good in their experience at all. They were taken advantage of from day one, abused and manipulated and left with CPTSD. I’m not suggesting that they see benefit where there was none. Everyone must be honest with their own experience and feelings.

However, they can still perhaps admit that some people in the sangha experienced benefit, just as those who experienced only benefit can still admit that some people also experienced harm.

And thanks Tenzin for the inspiration for this post. You gave me the kick in the bum I needed to finally say it out loud.

A Question  

So I’ll leave you with this: What would it look like to hold both truths in your own life? To acknowledge the good without excusing the bad, and to face the bad without rejecting the good?  

It’s not easy – especially if you were directly harmed by someone – but maybe it’s worth trying.  what do you think?

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Yangsi Rinpoche and the Recurring Shadow of Abuse in Tibetan Buddhist Lineages

Here we are again. Another story of abuse by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher.
Another woman harmed, another community shaken, another institution scrambling to respond. And for those of us who lived through this pattern from the inside, it’s painfully familiar.

According to reporting from Willamette Week, a former student and employee of Maitripa College in Portland has accused its long‑time spiritual leader, Yangsi Rinpoche, of a years‑long sexual relationship shaped by an unequal power dynamic and framed as part of her religious practice. The allegations, made by former student Sunitha Bhaskaran, describe unwanted encounters that she felt compelled to participate in because of his status as her guru and the strong culture of devotion within the institution.

The draft civil complaint alleges that the relationship began in 2015 and continued until 2021, and that Rinpoche presented the sexual contact as connected to tantric purification practices — a framing many of us will recognise from other Tibetan Buddhist abuse cases. Although the complaint was never filed in court, the parties reached a confidential settlement in 2025. Maitripa College and Yangsi Rinpoche deny the allegations.

For those who don’t know, Maitripa College is affiliated with the FPMT, part of a global network of Tibetan Buddhist centres. Former students interviewed in the article describe a culture that strongly emphasised guru devotion and encouraged viewing the teacher as enlightened — another pattern we’ve seen repeated across communities. ourbuddhismworld.com

Below is the link to the full article if you’d like to read it yourself.

Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Buddhist Leader Trigger Investigation at Maitripa College

My Reflection

What strikes me — again — is not just the allegation itself, but the structure around it. The same ingredients appear every time:

  • a teacher elevated beyond accountability
  • a culture that equates devotion with obedience
  • a student taught to override her own instincts
  • a community shocked, then divided
  • an institution protecting its reputation

It’s a pattern so predictable that many of us can recite it from memory.

And this is why stories like this matter. Not because we want to dwell on harm, but because naming the pattern is part of breaking it. Tibetan Buddhism, especially in its traditional forms, has repeatedly failed to address the shadow side of guru devotion — and until that changes, these stories will keep emerging.

This story raises questions many of us have asked before — sometimes quietly, sometimes with rage, sometimes with grief:

How many times does this pattern need to repeat before Tibetan Buddhist institutions confront the shadow built into their own structures? Will they ever?

For those of us who lived inside these systems, the dynamics are painfully familiar: the elevation of the teacher, the pressure to surrender discernment, the spiritualisation of obedience, the silencing of doubt, the confusion between devotion and self‑abandonment.

So I’d love to hear your reflections:

  • What patterns do you see repeating across these communities?
  • How did the structure of guru devotion shape your own experience — for better or worse?
  • What do you think needs to change for genuine safety and accountability to exist in Tibetan Buddhist spaces?
  • And perhaps the deepest question: What does spiritual authority look like when it’s no longer built on hierarchy, secrecy, or unquestioned power?

Feel free to share as much or as little as you like. Your voice matters here — and your insight helps illuminate the path beyond the temple.

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The Architecture of Silence: A Search for Integrity – A Personal Account of My Experience with B. Alan Wallace 

(What follows is a guest post sharing a personal account of a long-term student’s relationship with B. Alan Wallace, meditation teacher, and his community. My thanks to the author for bringing these details to light in this way. It’s important for us to share these stories as a way to raise awareness around these kinds of cult dynamics that can take over a community even if they begin with the best of intentions. The images are mine, created using Midjourney. – Tahlia)

The Search for Integrity

Recently, I watched a very interesting conversation between Gabor Maté, the renowned medical doctor, and a few spiritual teachers. Gabor asked a question within the context of the “Architecture of Silence”, that often surrounds, protects, envelops, and seeps into, spiritual communities. This is Gabor’s question:

“I’ve been struck over the years by how it’s almost a deal within spiritual communities for abuse to take place, so that there have been teachers, great teachers, or teachers that have been considered great, and have had many followers who’ve planted many seeds of spiritual endeavor who then turned out to be abusers. Is it possible for people to transmit great spiritual truths, and yet be so antithetical to their truths in their behavior?”

I’ve been asking the same question deep in my heart, almost unconsciously. Because this wish for integrity between teachings and behavior comes deep down from the guts, and from the heart – it doesn’t come from conceptual thinking. It is all about feeling trust in the relationship, not conceptualizing it.

Early Devotion and the Commitment to Shamatha

The first time I heard from Alan Wallace was in 2010 in Sydney. I attended a public talk at a Buddhist Institute, and I was struck by his presence. He emanated security and power – traits that I missed back then, and that likely I wanted to see in someone. I then started reading his books avidly, and attending his retreats. I was 28 years old.

In 2014, at the conclusion of one of his retreats in Sydney, as I offered him a ceremonial scarf, he said personally to my ear: “If you enter the path in this lifetime, I’d be very happy.” It was a pivotal moment that crystallized my aspiration to enter the path. Alan kept drilling, in retreats and podcasts, the centrality of achieving shamatha to enter the path.

The Call to Full-Time Retreat and Building Projects with Alan Wallace

The entire architecture of Alan’s teachings, and the way he was presenting them, created conditions for me to believe that entering full-time retreat was the best thing to do, regardless of family conditions, of work, of money, of anything else. It was a hero’s journey. I had heard from Alan, repeatedly, of the necessity to achieve shamatha to enter the practice of vipashyana effectively. I felt that Alan was embodying the Dharma, and I started believing in the need for creating spaces where people could practice shamatha.

Therefore, I started doing solo retreats — but very early, I started noticing the challenges of doing that. I was receiving no support from anyone around. Nevertheless, in 2015, I decided to leave my job at a Buddhist Institute to fully dedicate myself to Alan’s project.

Financial Sacrifice and the Reality of Hardship

I was running out of money to support my aspirations, but I trusted Alan’s comment that “food will roll uphill”. Towards the end of 2015, I participated in the first of a series of 8-week retreats in Queensland, Australia. On the very first day of the retreat – a retreat I fully had paid for – Alan suddenly came to talk to me: we sat down, and he started mentioning a retreat land in Italy, perfect for the practice of shamatha. It was a land apparently blessed by Khadro-la (a revered Tibetan teacher) who, while dancing on the land, said: “Here people can achieve shamatha”. He then asked: “Can you help me with this project, as I don’t have time to follow it?”. I said yes, certainly. And in a matter of minutes, Alan presented me with a project to lead on another continent. I do not recall him asking if I wanted to do it, or if I had the capacity to commit, and it was my distinct impression that there was no expectation or offer of financial compensation for this work. In that moment, I felt his tone was so authoritative that I didn’t feel I had the space to offer a different perspective; it felt to me like a done deal.

Tying his Shoes 

I want to share a truly bizarre moment from one of his 2016 retreats in Sydney. As I was climbing the stairs to his room, I overheard another student giggling. Alan jokingly told her, “She couldn’t tie my shoes,” then pointed to me his own untied laces while looking at me. I ended up kneeling down to tie them for him. To this day, I don’t understand the behavior; it felt like an unnecessary display of power over his students.

The Experience of Illness and Vulnerability in Retreat

In the middle of a retreat in Sydney in July 2017, I fell sick with an UTI, and some friends from there brought me to the hospital, as I was in a lot of pain. I was administered some antibiotics, and after one night I was discharged, and went back to the retreat. I was still very sick though, and I was feeling very vulnerable – I had given all my money to follow Alan and support his project — to the point that I was, essentially, homeless. The relationship with my family was terrible, and they wouldn’t support my aspirations in any way. But I kept thinking that Alan was helping me on this path.

When I came back to the retreat venue, I went straight into my room. I had no strength, so I lay in bed, struggling with pain, both physically and mentally. After Alan finished his teaching, I begged a friend to ask Alan to visit me. I needed some words of encouragement, some help. I waited outside my room to greet Alan, and as he approached, he almost shouted: “What happened??”. He then entered my room, and as I closed the door, I started crying, not sure why. Anyway, Alan saw me crying, but he didn’t say a word about that.

As he sat in front of me, I experienced a profound lack of the empathy or encouragement I so desperately felt I needed. My perception of him in that room was one of distance and coldness; I felt as though my vulnerability was a source of irritation to him rather than a call for compassion. While he may have seen the encounter differently, to me, it felt like a cold and brief exchange at the most fragile moment of my life. I was homeless, had spent all my money to attend his retreats, I was trying with all my might to enter full-time retreat, plus I was helping him to create a center in Italy and Australia, and I was translating his books — all for free. While he sat there, I felt as if there was a big chasm between us. I was just recovering from a severe infection and high fever, and asking my teacher — the most important person for me at that moment — for some affection, for some understanding. I received none of it.

The meeting lasted less than five minutes. As he left my room, I stood up and as he was walking away, I said: “I’ll do my best,” and he replied quickly and offhandedly “I’m sure you will”. And that was the end of it. That night I almost went insane. I couldn’t sleep, I was in deep pain every time I urinated, and I felt utterly devastated.

Somehow, I managed to pass the night. The next morning, I was still in pain, but had recovered enough to go to his room to say goodbye. I was barely able to stand. He was in a rush to leave, and he only said, “Bye bye, see you in Melbourne.” And indeed, I was meant to attend his next retreat in Melbourne, but he couldn’t spend even one minute asking me how I was. It had been the most vulnerable and lowest point of my life, and my teacher, to whom I had devoted every waking hour for the past four years, seemingly could not care how I was. This encounter lasted just a few seconds.

An Example of Cold Anger during an 8-week Retreat

However, I was still quite entangled with him so I kept attending his retreats. During a 2018 retreat in Italy, I participated at an informal outdoor session where Khadro-la gave basic, non-secret teachings to our group of sixty – Alan included. Because the atmosphere was so relaxed and no one mentioned any restrictions, many of us—myself included—recorded the talk on our mobile phones quite openly.

The situation turned sour the next morning. Alan arrived at the meditation hall in a state of cold anger, berating the entire group for recording the session and allegedly uploading it online without Khadro-la’s permission (an accusation for which we were given no evidence, and to my knowledge, no one had actually done). He didn’t allow for any discussion or defense; he simply vented his frustration at all of us, feeling entirely entitled to do that to a group of sixty people. He then left the session in a rage, without any explanation for not giving his morning dharma talk.

Shocked by the intensity of his outburst, after he left the hall, I stood up and publicly identified myself as one of the recorders, basically acting as a scapegoat for the group, and for Alan. Hoping to mend the relationship, a few friends and I wrote a formal letter of apology to him. I still remember the pain I felt in my stomach, and how much I cried for that event. We approached Alan later that day, offering the letter of apology along with a ceremonial scarf. He took the letter, barely glanced at it, and walked away without saying a single word about the episode—then or ever again.

The Structural Architecture of Harm

Slowly, I started distancing myself from him. Something in my guts was telling me not to trust this person. Moving forward to August 2025, I read the public letters from Terran Palmer-Angell and Carmen Maria. Reading their accounts, the patterns they described resonated deeply with my own history, and my experience with Alan began to make sense in a broader context. I wish Alan well, but I aspire to a relation based on reciprocity and deep listening, as spiritual friends with no hierarchy, something that Alan was unable to provide.

In my opinion, the social fabric in which Alan Wallace acted as a teacher, favored silent compliance, a rigid hierarchy, and a teacher-student relationship in which there was no reciprocity, as if the student was simply an empty container. An architecture where there was no sharing within a community, just a higher authority that has all the wisdom, all the power, and supposedly all the compassion.

I felt a deep internal pressure that if I strayed from compliance, I would face social exclusion or criticism from the teacher and the group. I sometimes heard him use phrases such as “He is breaking his samayas” when referring to others. I personally found this language deeply unsettling, as I perceived it being used in a way that felt more like a tool for criticism and social control than a means of genuine spiritual guidance. In my view, this contributed to an environment where silence and compliance were the safest paths.

I wish I could help Alan understand, because I’ve seen what is wrong in this spiritual family, and, at least in part, I developed some understanding and compassion for him. Thank you for reading.

Claudio Li Calzi,

Founder of the Australian Contemplative Observatory and board member from 2013 till 2018

Board member of the Center for Contemplative Research in Italy from 2023 till 2025

Italian translator of B. Alan Wallace’s books “Stilling the Mind”, “Fathoming the Mind”, “Dudjom Lingpa’s Visions of Great Perfection” in three volumes, and “Dzokchen – A Commentary on Dudjom Rinpoché’s “Illumination of Primordial Wisdom”

Italian editor of the books “Natural Liberation” by Padmasambhava, and “A Spacious Path to Freedom” by Karma Chagme, both translated by B. Alan Wallace

Student of B. Alan Wallace for 15 years.

The account represents the personal experiences, recollections, and honest opinions of the author, Claudio Li Calzi, during his 15-year tenure as a student and board member within organizations associated with B. Alan Wallace. All events are described to the best of the author’s memory and are intended to foster open dialogue and transparency regarding institutional structures in spiritual communities.

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Finding Spiritual Autonomy in Nature

For those who’ve experienced spiritual abuse or whose minds don’t fit the mould of dogmatic obedience, the quiet of the forest offers a different kind of refuge. My first instinct when I left Rigpa was to find refuge in the silence of the forest, and many others in the Beyond the Temple community also replaced the shrine room with nature. 

These are the opening words of my latest video for the Beyond the Temple channel. Watch the video for the rest, or read the rest of the transcript ( with more added) below.

It was such a relief to simply sit in the forest without having to follow a form, read a text, or navigate the dynamics of a community that was more concerned with their own reputation than their students’ well-being. What I found was that immersing myself in nature didn’t only bring solace, it grounded my recovery from religious trauma and gave me a way to still honour my spiritual nature without the weight of obedience to something external from myself, specifically someone I could no longer trust.

After leaving the religion, I needed to come to something pure, uncomplicated and unburdened by dogma. And I had to take back agency over my own spiritual life. I had to learn to genuinely take refuge in my own true nature.

Bear with me here, while I compare the teachings on refuge to the reality of life in some sanghas. I’m going into this to show why – even within the Buddhist teachings themselves – it’s important for us to learn to trust our own inner wisdom.

Buddhism teaches us that we all have Buddha nature, and that this is our true nature, but we don’t realise our true nature because it’s obscured – by habits, emotions, concepts, and karma. Though Buddhists outwardly take refuge in the Buddha, his teachings, and the community of practitioners, our ultimate refuge is our own Buddha nature. 

The Buddha taught this in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, “Dwell with yourself as your own island, with yourself as your own refuge, take no other refuge.”

The refuge practice of the Longchen Nyingtik Ngondro even says that our own wisdom nature is the ultimate refuge when it says we take refuge ‘in the maṇḍala of essence, nature, and compassion’ – meaning in our mind’s empty essence and awareness, the union of which brings compassion.

Added to that, in the actual vajrayana practices, the lama is a symbol for our own wisdom nature. When we invoke the lama, we’re invoking our own wisdom self. 

That’s the teaching, however, when it comes to Tibetan Buddhism, the teachings on devotion to the master – who is supposed to inspire your journey inwards –  can very easily turn it into an outwardly focused  journey of obedience to a teacher. When devotion is touted as the ultimate path, we can end up taking refuge in the outer teacher and not in our own inner wisdom/ Buddha nature/ true nature of mind. There are many words for it, but we don’t find it if we focus on the outer teacher, and the major cult dynamic that enables abuse is unconditional surrender to the personality of the teacher. 

 External authorities, such as cult leaders, demand conformity over authentic experience. Authentic experience was to some extent devalued in Rigpa. If insights were asked for, your genuine expression of your experience was either completely disregarded or belittled unless you used actual language from the scriptures. That made some of us second guess our genuine insights, so I felt I needed to offload all that baggage and see what was left, find what was real without any dogmatic overlay.

So when we leave a cult of devotion, we need to find our own autonomy again, for both psychological and spiritual health. But finding our way when we’ve been following a path that was all laid out for us isn’t easy. How do we know where to go with our spiritual life, when what we believed in and trusted has all fallen away?  And how do we develop trust in ourselves, after having put our trust in a teacher and a community who proved ultimately unworthy of it?

I can’t answer those questions for anyone other than myself, but I found that practicing presence, just sitting quietly and simply being me, in natural spaces, where no one was watching or judging or demanding, was incredibly healing. It reaffirmed the validity of my own experience, and out of the stillness of the forest and the awareness it naturally invokes, I found my way forward. 

And out of this came intense gratitude for the natural world, and particularly the forest. The forest teaches without words, without expectations or demands. It teaches by its very presence. All we have to do is visit a forest, as often as we can. 

Has nature been a support for your spiritual path, particularly if you’re healing from spiritual abuse? If so, let me know in the comments how that happened for you.

And me, I’ve taken to dancing in the forest, dancing my gratitude and appreciation whilst singing a mantra that calls on the power of great awareness. 

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Cult Recovery – Using Different Language to Re-evaluate your Experience

Different words have different effects on different people. What inspires some may make others want to puke. The same words have subtley different meanings and associations for different people, and the language we habitually use effects the way we see the world.

While in a cult or religion, we use the language of their teachings to describe our spiritual experiences, and cult recovery experts say it’s helpful when recovering from a cult experience to re-evaluate and reframe our spiritual experiences using our own language. This helps us to claim those experiences for ourself, to see them as our own experience, not something dependent on the cult teachings.

Though we may find some of the cult terminology still useful, we will likely need to discard a lot – or all – of it because it lilely triggers a renewed sense of betrayal and cause flashbacks to traumatic memories for those who were directly abused. If we continue to use cult-speak without re-evaluating the language we were programed to use, are we still, to some degree, under the sway of the cult teachings?

In this video I also mention the problem that we also might have unknowingly – to some degree – manufactured an ‘experience’ to meet the expectations set up by the cult’s language. Or we may have assigned certain terms to experiences that may not have been the actual meaning of the terms, simply because we expected to have an experience we could label that way. I wonder how many of those now teaching in Rigpa who declare that abuse was a teaching for them dissociated in response to the trauma of being abused or watching abuse (which is an automatic self-preservation response to that kind of situation) and mistook that state for the ‘nature of mind’. If so, they’re now busy teaching others to make the same mistake! Sigh.

Are there any terms that you just can’t abide now because of their close association with your abusive lama?

For me, for instance, I refuse to use the word ‘karma’ now, especially given how it was used to enable the abuse, and I can’t use the term ‘rigpa’, for obvious reasons. I try not to use the ‘nature of mind’, preferring to use something like ‘essential awareness’ – not that it’s something I need or want to talk about much these days! I heard Jeff Brown use the term ‘unity consciousness’ recently and I thought that was quite good. Does that work for you?

If any of these questions of what I say in the video inspires a response, please share in the comments below.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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Why Some Tibetan Buddhist Practictioners Can’t See Abuse as Abuse

When eight of his students wrote a combined letter that exposed Sogyal Rinoche’s abuse, I was initially amazed at how some people simply couldn’t see what he did as abuse. I figured that once it was out in the open, everyone would see how his behaviour constituted abuse. I was wrong, and some today still cannot recognise his behaviour as abuse, despite the independent report undertaken by the renowned law firm Lewis Silkin saying:

Based on the evidence available to me, I am satisfied that, on the balance of probabilities:
a. some students of Sogyal Lakar (who were part of the ‘inner circle’, as described later in this report) have been subjected to serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse by him; and
b. there were senior individuals within Rigpa who were aware of at least some of these issues and failed to address them, leaving others at risk.

KAREN BAXTER, PARTNER, LEWIS SILKIN LLP, 22 August 2018

Why are some people so blind that they cannot see that the beatings, sexual coercion, and emotional and psychological abuse mentioned in the report are abuse, and that Sogyal’s actions did harm the people who were the focus of his lust and tantrums?

Though many have revised their opinon, the lack of the word ‘abuse’ in Rigpa’s renewed apology indicates that some still in power in Rigpa still cannot admit that Sogyal did abuse people. Why is this? And why does it mean that the last apology they gave (see my post on it here) is likely the best they can do?

These are the questions I attempt to answer in this video.

For more detail on the beliefs I mention, see section 2 of my book, Fallout: Recovering from Abuse in Tibetan Buddhism.

https://aiapublishing.com/product/fallout-recovering-from-abuse-in-tibetan-buddhism-tahlia-newland/

And for a historical perspective on Sogyal Rinpoche’s abuse, see Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rinpoche

Image by MichaelRaab from Pixabay

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Poison is Medicine: Has Dzongsar Khyentse Clarified or Muddied the Waters?

Today we have a post by Joanne Clark as a follow up to her last post on Dzongsar Khyentse and nihilism.

“In our practice, we may view the guru’s behavior as that of a mahasiddha, but in the   conventional world we follow the general Buddhist approach, and if a certain behavior is harmful, we should say so.”

HH Dalai Lama, The Foundation of Buddhist Practice

Leaving the Boat Too Early

In Dzongsar’s recent publication, Poison is Medicine, which is based on teachings that he gave in Rigpa Centres following the revelations of abuses by Sogyal Lakhar, his intention is to clarify “the misunderstandings and misapprehensions about the Vajrayana that were exposed by the Vajrayana guru-related scandals of the 2010s.” (Poison is Medicine; vii) By “scandals”, I presume he means “abuses.” However, with statements such as the following, I question what clarity can result:

Continue reading “Poison is Medicine: Has Dzongsar Khyentse Clarified or Muddied the Waters?”
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Rigpa’s Renewed Apology & the Teaching on the Four Powers of Confession

Rigpa’s renewed apology, published in the middle of October 2021, for ‘mistakes that have been made and harm that has been caused’ is a step in the right direction, but in the video I explain why it still falls short of what is required even in terms of their own teachings. I refer to the four powers of confession that according to Vajrasattva practice – a key practice of the Rigpa sangha – are necessary for healing to occur.

Continue reading “Rigpa’s Renewed Apology & the Teaching on the Four Powers of Confession”
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Dzongsar Khyentse & his Dance with Nihilism

broken buddha

Today we have a post by Joanne Clark inspired by the release of Dzongsar Khyentse’s latest book. Thank you, Joanne. It’s high time we challenged Dzongsar Khyentse for his support of abusive behaviour by vajrayana masters. Dzongsar Khyentse’s followers show all the signs of people caught in a destructive cult, which might tell us why Dzongsar Khyentse is so intent on supporting abuse as a legitimate part of his religion – at least for the varjayana student-teacher relationship. Read on for Joanne’s article.

“The late Professor Joshi in his book, he cites one of the factors that led to the degeneration of Buddhism inside India was the popularization of tantric practices, particularly leading to unethical behavior.” HH Dalai Lama

It is possible that Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse has reached a point of realization whereby he can sit down to a meal of faeces and a drink of urine and consume it as if enjoying a delicious feast. It is possible then that he could rape a princess in the same manner that Tilopa killed fish, such that no harm would result.[1]

In the same way, it is possible that his Vajrayana students, those who have taken vows of pure perception, are advanced enough in their own realizations that they are no longer at risk of confusing the madyamaka views on emptiness with nihilism—no longer at risk of failing to maintain a coherent view of conventional truth and karmic laws of cause and effect and failing to recognize harm as harm.

Continue reading “Dzongsar Khyentse & his Dance with Nihilism”
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