Healing Archives - Beyond the Temple

August 10, 2026August 24, 2026

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

June 7, 2026June 6, 2026

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?

April 19, 2026April 19, 2026

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.

July 27, 2022July 27, 2022

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

November 21, 2021November 21, 2021

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.

December 31, 2019January 27, 2021

After religion? Do What Makes Your Heart Sing!

When you’ve become aware of the corruption in the religion you’ve followed for decades and moved on from it, what replaces the dictates of that religion for your spiritual study and practice? What comes after religion?

Tibetan Buddhism gave us a form to follow, one we thought we could trust until we discovered we’d been taken for a ride and all the pretty words we resonated with were ultimately being used as a way to capture slaves for a corrupt king. We had daily meditation practices to do that set our minds on a good track for the day, and those meditations had forms, even if only the simple one of starting with a motivation to benefit beings, practice without concepts, and at the end dedicate the practice to the benefit of all. We didn’t have to work anything out for ourselves, and if a practice didn’t suit us for some reason, we did it anyway, or tried our best.

December 24, 2019January 27, 2021

Rigpa Australia Apologises & Admits Sogyal Rinpoche’s Abuse was Wrong

After being prompted by Joanne McCarthy, a journalist for The Newcastle Herald, Kathryn James, the chair of Rigpa Australia, recently publically gave the kinds of statement that we’ve been wanting to hear from every Rigpa organisation.

Journalist Joanne McCarthy isn’t someone that can be put off with platitudes and deflections. She won a Gold Walkley award, the most prestigious of the Walkley Awards for Australian journalism, so her writing holds weight. She’s experienced in dealing with religious groups and their methods of deflecting, minimising and covering up, due to her reporting on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, as well as other cult and corruption issues, such as the pelvic mesh scandal.

October 30, 2019January 27, 2021

The challenge of losing your spiritual path

When members of a Tibetan Buddhist group discover that their leader abused people, their reactions tend to fall roughly into the following categories:

Those who deny or ignore the abuse or explain it away according to their belief system (thinking it’s genuine crazy wisdom) and remain committed to their religion and their group;
Those who accept that the abuse happened and know it was wrong, but stay in the religion and the group, believing that the group will genuinely change such that abuse can never happen again;
Those who leave the group but not the religion;
Those who leave Tibetan Buddhism but remain a Buddhist;
Those who leave Buddhism.

April 23, 2019April 23, 2019

Time to Move On? Or not?

The idea of moving on as an indication of healing from a distressing situation can be applied to both individuals and to organisations. In this post I look first at how Rigpa is using the idea of Rigpa Moving Forward, and then at how a narrow view of the concept of moving on can be counterproductive to our personal healing.

Rigpa Moving Forward

Rigpa has a web page called Rigpa Moving Forward on which they list all the things they’ve done and plan to do following The Lewis Silken Independent Report on the allegations made in the July 2017 letter by the eight Rigpa students. Though it reads if all the right things are being done – and their transparancy is admirable – if they follow the pattern they’ve established so far in dealing with the abuse issues, the results are likely to fall short of their assurances, as they did with the Rigpa Code of Conduct, and what Rigpa are referring to as ‘apologies’.

Lewis Silkin report Download

What we see in their communications to the sangha is a desire to move on as soon as possible from a situation where the embarrasing issue of abuse in Rigpa is in the public spotlight. They want everyone to forget about it and get back to business, but isn’t it a bit premature to be pushing for moving on when the issues at the core of the problem haven’t been solved? Everything they have done, which they proudly list on the Moving Forward webpage, have been the equivilent of putting a Band Aid on a cancer.

Band Aid on a cancer

Why is it like a Band Aid on a cancer? Because their spiritual advisors apparently believe, as Sogyal did, that once a student has taken a lama as their tantric guru, they cannot criticise, must obey him or her without question, see their teacher as a living Buddha, and see his or her every action as the beneifical actions of a Buddha no matter what they do. These are the very same beliefs that created the Rigpa culture that enabled the abuse, and no matter what a code of conduct says and no matter how good they get at listening to their acolytes, while they still cling to these beliefs, nothing fundamental has changed. And just as cancer ignored will only fester, an organisation that makes only surface changes when the cause of the issue runs deep will never be truly healthy.

Ripe for reoccurance

It’s a situation ripe for reoccurance of abuse, even with a lama who has signed their code of conduct. How can that be? Because the code, though it sounds good on the surface, uses vague terminology open to different interpretations and does not catagorically rule out sexual relations between teachers and students other than during an actual teaching event. It does not rule out grooming a student during an event for a sexual relationship after the event nor does it define what kinds of actions constitute harm.

And the section of the Rigpa Shared Values & Guidelines document titled ‘Entering the Vajrayana Path’ says that when students make ‘a formal request for this level of spiritual guidance’ that constitutes ‘consent to this level of spiritual guidance.’ Given the beliefs mentioned above that are still in play about ‘this level of spiritual guidance’, that consent could mean consent to what some would call crazy wisdom and what others would call abuse.

Moving forward or putting on a good front?

The Moving Forward page is a handy resource for Rigpa management and instructors since they can point to it to assure anyone who raises the issue of Sogyal’s abuse that it’s all being taken care of. But is it?

The page says, ‘The teams managing Rigpa internationally and nationally, including the Vision Board, have been reflecting on the culture that enabled this situation to take place, and continue to do so. Workshops specifically addressing this topic will continue to take place in the coming months.’ This sounds wonderful –
as I pointed out above, getting to the root of the problem is exactly what they should be doing – however, sources inside Rigpa have told me that they have heard nothing about such workshops. But even if they do actually work out what beliefs enabled the abusive culture, will they be prepared to actually go against their advisors views and change them?

Given all this, isn’t the idea of Rigpa truly moving on from an abuse enabling culture at the vajryana level at the worst impossible and at the best premature?

When moving on is counterproductive

A popular idea is that healing from any distressing situation requires one to ‘move on’. Though some kind of alteration of one’s relationship to a distressing situation needs to occur for us to heal, the idea of the necessity of moving on as soon as possible can be misused. It can be a way of saying, ‘Shut up I don’t want to hear about it any more,’ or ‘the problem is solved, everything is now okay,’ even when it isn’t.

In the following video I talk about the importance of not moving on prematurely and not having a narrow view of what is meant by ‘moving on’. The ‘issue’ I refer to here is, of course, that of abuse in Tibetan Buddhism

Do you feel that you have ‘moved on’? In what way? And what does ‘moving on’ look like for you? Let’s talk about this in the comments.

If you’d like a more private place to chat about your ongoing spiritual path after you’ve left an abusive community, you can join the Beyond the Temple Facebook group. This group is for people who don’t want to talk about abuse, but want to keep in touch and share their discoveries, inspiration and challenges as they move on with their lives.

If you want to talk about abuse, then Rigpa or ex-Rigpa students can join the secret What Now? group. Apply via the contact form here, telling us about yourself and why you want to join the group.

Students from other Vajrayana communities who need somewhere where they can talk about abuse and find survivor support can join the Survivors of Vajrayana Abuse and their Allies group.

Note that you will not be added to these groups if you don’t answer the questions.

The Facebook page and You Tube Channel associated with this blog are called Living in Peace and Clarity. Click the relevant link on the side bar to ‘Like’ and ‘Subscribe’.

Image by Stafford GREEN from Pixabay

September 13, 2018

Can You Still Take Sogyal as Your teacher?

It’s okay to leave

Many lamas have said that if you discover, even after making a commitment to them, that a lama is not who you thought they were, or if they are not good for you, or if the relationship has broken down for whatever reason, then one can walk away from one’s vajra master without an issue with samaya, so long as one retains respect for the good one gained from the relationship.

And HH Dalai Lama said in Dharamsala 1993, “If you have already taken tantric initiations from them [a guru], you should not develop disrespect or antipathy. In such cases, the Kalachakra Tantra advises us to maintain a neutral attitude and not pursue the relationship any further.”
Chokyi Ngyima Rinpoche told a friend of mine, “If you can no longer see your tantric guru as a Buddha, then you should leave quietly.”

The usual advice is to leave quietly, but both His Holiness Dalai lama and Mingyur Rinpoche have said that when serious abuse has occured if a teacher does not respond to private requests for the behaviour to stop – as is the case with Sogyal – then it is necessary to make the abuses public in order to protect others and the purity of the dharma.

Motivation is the key: speaking out of hatred or desire for revenge is wrong. However, if we know that by not speaking out, their negative behavior will continue and will harm the Buddhadharma, and we still remain silent, that is wrong.” HH Dalai Lama. Dharamsala 1993.

That’s why people have spoken out publically or have spoken to Karen Baxter as part of the independent investigation into the allegations raised in the Letter to Sogyal Lakar 14-07-2017

A master of serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse

The results of the independant investigation confirmed that the behaviours outlined in that letter are true:

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;

Karen Baxter in the Lewis Silkin report details widespread evidence that members of Sogyal’s inner circle – who catered to his every need, including providing massages as he fell asleep – were subjected to repeated acts of brutal violence. The lama’s wooden backscratcher was a favoured method for beating people, as was punching them in the stomach. Baxter says she has been provided with evidence of one individual being knocked unconscious, others being left bleeding and concussed.

She also outlines “significant” first-hand evidence of young women being coerced, manipulated and intimidated into providing sexual favours. One witness, a teenager who arrived at a Rigpa retreat seeking respite from depression and self-harm, was asked to strip a week after coming to work in the lama kitchen. When she refused, she alleges, she was beaten and then later forced into sex.
If you are a student of Sogyal Rinpoche and haven’t read the full report, you need to. Until you do, you have not fully investigated your teacher.
And you need to try to understand the depth of the harm that Sogyal caused, that the harm was not only in the event that caused the trauma, but also in the resulting Post Traumatic Stress that plagues survivors for decades (if not their whole life) afterwards.
Rigpa communications pay lip service to compassion, but their actions show no real compassion towards survivors of Sogyal Rinpoche’s abuse and no understanding of the long-term results of the trauma they experienced. Research Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the dynamics and results of domestic abuse, and you might start to understand the depth of the harm, and begin to see just how sick the Rigpa culture is in the inner circle. The trauma is similar to that experienced by children with an abusive family. And what you read in the report is only the tip of the iceburg.

Now that you know the truth, can you still take him as your teacher?

So, with that in mind, how can anyone possibly still take Sogyal as their teacher now? I think we can try to rationalize staying faithful with all sorts of philosophy, but it’s likely to be be the same philosophy that allowed it all to happen in the first place – the Rigpa-speak party line of crazy wisdom, pure perception and devotion all slightly skewed to enable the abuse. That’s what we were fed, after all, and it’s what we’ll still believe unless we’ve examined those beliefs in light of what happened and seen how they were used to manipulate, control and silence us.

If you’re trying to hold onto your belief in Sogyal’s worth as a teacher, then ask yourself why, against all evidence to the contrary?
You may have had only good interactions with him yourself, but does that make up for the serious harm he caused others? No it does not, just as in the Jimmy Saville case. No one would say that the good that he did makes up for the harm he caused.
Over the last year I have heard many more stories such as those in the report. This didn’t happen to only a few people, and a lot of people are too scared to speak out. Some are too scared to even consider that they were abused in the name of training. The long-term results of that denial is not good for their mental health. If you’re having flashbacks to your ‘training’, particularly ones associated with a feeling of fear or anxiety in your body, then you have been traumatised, and your mental gymnastics to tell yourself that it was love, not abuse, is the result of the brainwashing you were subjected to that made you ‘take’ it and see people ‘taking it’ without complaint. Listen to your body, not your mind on this, and if you are unsure if what you experienced was abuse or love, then don’t talk to someone in Rigpa (because they’ll pretend to be open but their agenda is likely to be to try to convince you it was love), find a councilor from outside and have a chat.
Fear is not a good motivation for remaining with a teacher – fear of hell, of being shuned or shamed, of losing one’s practice and so on – but you can leave without breaking samaya. You just say thank you for the good you brought me, but my trust in you is now broken, so I must move on. And there are other lamas who you can go to so your practice need not suffer if you’re afraid of it falling apart. Just substitute one lama for the other. After all, the focus of our practice was supposed to be Guru Rinpoche, the embodiment of the love and compassion of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
I handle this situation by thinking – he was my teacher and I gained much from my relationship with him. I’ll always be grateful for that, but now he is no longer my teacher. I could not possibly take him as my teacher now that I know what I know. He is, as HHDL says, “Disgraced.”

Were the teachings as pure as we thought?

Now I believe that his teachings on devotion and pure perception, though not incorrect, were subtly distorted in order to set himself up at the centre of our spiritual life, to make us dependent on him, and to make his inner circle his virtual slaves, just as in any personality cult. I doubt this was intentional; it is, however, what happened.
It’s hard to accept that you were, or are, in a cult, but after studying what characterises a cult, and seeing how Rigpa management persists in using cult tactics for manipulation of student’s perceptions, I can come to no other conclusion. Once I accepted that, I found the literature on recovering from a cult very helpful. Here on the blog, we looked at some of the key beliefs we were taught and saw how they had been used to manipulate and control us, and to give Sogyal permission to behave as he liked. Once you see that, there is no going back.

The yes-or-no question

But whether or not you want to use the cult word, and whether or not you want to stay and try to help Rigpa reform, you still have to ask yourself: Is this a man I can follow as my spiritual teacher now? And the answer to that for this moment in time has to be yes or no.
For so long as you avoid asking yourself that question, and for so long as you avoid making a decision, you will be in a state of confusion, and your spiritual life will suffer. So I encourage you to decide. Can you still take Sogyal as your teacher now that you know what he is really like?

Current and previous students of Rigpa can participate in private discussion on this and other abuse-related topics on our What Now? Facebook Group. If you’re interested in joining, please contact us via the contact page and ask for an invite.
People from any Vajrayana sangha can join the Survivors of Vajrayana Abuse and Allies Facebook group for support. Click the link to request to join.
Anyone who has left a Buddhist sangha that had an abusive teacher can join the Beyond the Temple Facebook Group. The focus in this group is not on the abuse, but on ourselves and our spiritual life as we recover from our experience and look to the future. Click here and request to join.
The What Now? Reference Material page has links to a wealth of articles in the topics related to abuse in Buddhist communities. For links to places to assist in healing from abuse see the sangha care resources page.
Those of you who are interested in ‘keeping Buddhism clean’ could ‘Like’ the Dharma Protectors Facebook page, which posts links to related articles as they come to hand.