Meditation without meditating. What a great idea. Meditation practice, is, after all, practice for having a chill mind all the time, so anything that calls you back into that space, or any time you take a moment to breathe consciously. there it is, meditation without meditating. And that’s what I love about this video. It inspires me into a meditative state.
I combined a track of my husband Kris Newland’s inspirational chill music and my animated AI-generated art to create what I hope is an inspiring and soothing meditative experience. Take 6 minutes to relax and enjoy it.
Do you like it? Does it give you a calm spacious feeling? Or is it only me?
The ‘Meditations’ page on Psychemaginationhas this video in vertical format if you want to watch it on your phone. It also has many very short videos with evocative music and imagery to help you take a mental break anytime.
While you’re there I hope you’ll read my webbook Psychemagination. It’s an animated AI art gallery in a webbook, the story is of an imaginative, contemplative and archetypal journey into mind and spirit.
My take on meditation beyond the temple of religion, cults, and capitalism.
AI generated art by Tahlia Newland
One of the challenges for those who left a meditation / yoga / religious group disillusioned after revelations of abuse by our teachers was knowing what to discard and what to retain from the teachings and practice. Now 6 years after I walked away, my meditation practice (what little there is of it at present) has settled into something non-religious, based on vajrayana but pared right back to essentials, and that is a powerful tool for well-being.
What ‘works’ for me may work for others, so I decided to share what I know in an easily-digestable format, particularly in a place where I might help young people seeking meditation instruction in a world in which misconceptions and predators abound. So I’ve have a TikTok channel now https://www.tiktok.com/@simplybeingcreative. I also share my discovering-I’m-autistic journey and other aspects of my unique life in the rainforest. And I’ll be posting just the videos on meditation on the Beyond the Temple You Tube channel as well. You’ll find them on a playlist there titled ‘Meditation Beyond the Temple’.
This is the approach to meditation I take after 20 years of meditation practice & Buddhist studies followed by intense disallusionment with anything religious, cultish or dogmatic.
My emphasis will be on active and imaginative meditation, particularly with nuerodivergent people in mind – I have discovered that I am one!
I don’t think one can avoid the relationship between meditation and spirituality, given that the process of meditating uncovers that generally hidden aspect of ourselves, but it can be divorced from the worst excesses of religion and commodified dogmatic ‘spiritualiy’.
So watch the videos if you’re curious to see where I’ve landed in relationship to meditation, if you’re struggling with your meditation practice or it needs some extra inspiration, or if you’ve never meditated and are looking for some form of meditation that isn’t boring.
(Note that there’s only one there at the time of posting this.)
And as time goes by I’ll be sharing resources for visualisation on the page by this name that I’ve added to the website, like this image I created by prompting an AI art generator.
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.
I was a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for 20 years and left the religion 5 years ago when I discovered that my teacher Sogyal Rinpoche was abusing his close students and those running the organisation not only enabled it but also saw his abuse as a beneficial teaching, not something harmful. In the video below, I reflect on what of value has remained with me and how I view the religion now in light of my knowledge of abusive gurus/lamas, the cult dynamics they often employ, and the teachings that enable abuse.
It’s a long video (40 minutes) because I cover a lot of ground, so I hope you can take time to watch or listen to it.
The answer to the question of what remains from the tradition after Tibetan Buddhism and your perceptions of Tibetan Buddhism and its lamas after you’ve left will be different for different people, so please note that this is only my personal opinion and evaluation of my own experience. I know that some have been left with nothing but trauma after Tibetan Buddhism, and some are still struggling to sift through their experience and find anything worth keeping.
Though I share my understanding of dzogchen practice, please don’t take anything I say as any kind of teaching. My purpose in sharing my perspective is to provide the stimulation for you to reflect on these matters for yourself.
Please like the video and share it as it helps get it to more people.
If you were a Tibetan Buddhist and have left the religion, what has remained for you?
Why might you make a book into an NFT ebook? This video tells you about the first four books I wrote while inspired by the vision of Tibetan Buddhism. It also talks a bit about my journey as an author, how it relates to my journey out of Tibetan Buddhism and why you might want to invest in the Journey to Diamond Peak NFT ebook.
What I didn’t say in the video, but is actually quite important when it comes to NFTs, is that people buy them as investments. (You can buy and then on-sell them). One of the reasons for this is that they’re historical records. They mark and hold moments in time in the epheneral world of digital culture, and that gives them value that will acrue as time progresses, particularly if the digital art marks something of relevance for a movement of some kind – the beginning of a new art movement for instance. Journey to Diamond Peak is one of the first 14 NFT ebooks ever created, for that alone, it should one day give a return on your investment. If not for you, then for your descendents. The spiritual significance of the story, will also, I belive, be recognised one day.
We all have hidden beliefs. They’re ones we take as truth because they seem to be part of who we are. We don’t question them because we’ve always believed them or we’ve believed them for so long that we don’t doubt their truth. And we don’t see them because we don’t look for them. It’s like being in a cage and looking through the bars rather than at the bars. You don’t see the bars; you see through the spaces between them, so you don’t know you’re trapped, caged by your hidden beliefs.
You can find your hidden beliefs by asking yourself what you think about all kinds of things – women, men, marriage, science, religion, different races and so on. Whenever you ask yourself what you believe about something, you might uncover a hidden belief. But if they’re a core belief, they won’t be revealed by your first answer, not if you’ve held them since childhood. You may have more recent beliefs pasted on top, but core beliefs will always compromise the more recent belief because they’re stronger. A new belief, if it conflicts with a core belief, just won’t really stick. So you might think that you believe that all races are equal, for example, but deep down a belief in inequality might remain from childhood or from time in a cult. Until you uncover that hidden core belief and expose it to examination so it can fade away in the light of your adult or cult-free self, you’re holding conflicting beliefs and that will always bring some mental discomfort.
If we had known how to deal with a narcissist before getting close to Sogyal Rinpoche, would we have avoided the worst of him? Did those who avoided being abused by him do these kinds of things naturally? I’d love to read your answers to these questions.
I certainly kept my distance, even when I was asked to be national director many years ago. I said, ‘No,’ because I could see how it was for those in that role. I didn’t see anything other than the verbal abuse and the relentless driving of his team, but it was enough for me to know that I didn’t want to be in that role – no matter how much it was supposed to hasten my journey to enlightenment. Knowing what I know now, that Sogyal Rinpoche physically, emotionally, sexually and financially abused his close students, I’m really glad I stayed out of any role that would have brought me into his orbit.
Many weren’t so lucky! I hope these points on how to deal with a narcissist will protect you in future – even if the person trying to manipulate you might not fit all the boxes for narcissistic personality disorder. It’s not only narcissists who try to manipulate us.
People with narcissistic personality disorder manipulate those around them to coerce, diminish and take advantage of them.
By spotting how narcissists distort facts, language, feelings and ideas to you can gain distance from them which makes it easier to set healthy boundaries against them.
One of the things I learned about in the year after I discovered that Sogyal Rinpoche abused his close students was narcissistic personality disorder. In order to avoid potential abuse, all spiritual seekers should examine the question, is your guru a narcissist? Or was he or she a narcissist?
Narcissists are everywhere, and they are dangerous people who manipulate others for their own gain. They are masters at coercive control and often become abusive. If you know what to look for, you can see the signs of narcissistic personality disorder in people around you. Donald Trump is a good example of someone with narcissistic personality disorder and so was Sogyal Rinpoche.
I think it’s vital that we all know how to spot a narcissist so we can avoid being manipulated by one. They are able to be very charming, loving and alluring when it suits them, so it’s easy to get sucked in.
Charlotte Ward and David Voas first coined the term “conspirituality” in 2011, to describe the merger of conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality. I like to put a hyphen between the con and spirituality because it is a con. Spirituality is conscripted into the service of gurus and influencers concerned only with their success in terms of numbers of followers, who can then be turned into paying customers. When these gurus start espousing conspiracy theories, their followers – if they’re not critical thinkers and misinformation resilient – tend to believe them, and so the theories proliferate. Fact or fiction, the more people share them, the more people believe them. It’s easy to share that meme or opinion because it seems okay on the surface, but not checking it carefully before sharing is dangerous, for us and for society.
Just look at Trump’s conspiracy theory about the 2020 election. The result is the destabilisation of American society and an assault on the Capitol building.
