Spiritual awakening

Shambhala, a branch of Tibetan Buddhism headquartered in Canada, has long taught the virtue of 'basic goodness.' But a Tapestry special reveals the organization's history is full of allegations of sexual misconduct

 

Brandie Weikle and Rosie Fernandez

CBC

March 26, 2021

Warning: This story and the accompanying audio deals with sexual abuse in spiritual settings.

When Patricia Ullman first stumbled upon the spiritual teachings of the organization now known as Shambhala more than 40 years ago, she was literally searching for the meaning of life.

Raised as "a strict southern Baptist" — albeit one with a Jewish father — Ullman said she was depressed and, like many people in their early 20s, looking for direction as she made her way in the world.

Having just moved to Washington state, she met a young man who had been studying meditation in Boulder, Colo., under a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa.

"He described the meditation practice to me in a very simple way, saying that the basis of these teachings is that you don't have to keep searching outside of yourself for other people or other traditions that have the answers, but you can just sit down and look at your own mind," Ullman recalled in an interview with Mary Hynes, host of CBC Radio's Tapestry.

"And to me, that was like a bolt of lightning. Why didn't I hear this before in my life?"

Ullman went to some seminars with the spiritual leader, Trungpa, "and I could see the energy around him. He was attracting a lot of very intellectual, very powerful people." They included the likes of poet Allen Ginsberg and author Ram Dass, who is credited with establishing yoga's popularity with the Boomer generation. Joni Mitchell even wrote a song, Refuge of the Roads, about Trungpa.

Based in Halifax since 1986, Shambhala is an international organization with roots in Tibetan Buddhism. One of its core tenets is that every human being has a fundamental nature of basic goodness.

Yet Shambhala has been mired in allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct since 2018, when an initiative known as the Buddhist Project Sunshine raised questions about how a religion associated with kindness and non-violence could allow abusive leaders to go unchecked.

Buddhist Project Sunshine was started in February 2017 by Andrea Winn, a sexual abuse survivor who had grown up within the Shambhala tradition, to bring light to "widespread sexualized violence in the community." Winn, who says she was forced out of the community around 2000 when she raised concerns about the abuse, teamed up with lawyer Carol Merchasin to investigate abuse allegations in the community, which by then was under the leadership of Trungpa's son, Mipham Rinpoche — known in the Shambhala community as the Sakyong.

Amid allegations of abuse in 2018 against the Sakyong, Trungpa and other teachers, the Sakyong stepped away from his duties.

CBC Radio has not independently verified these claims.

​LISTEN: In Tapestry's special, part one looks at sexual abuse allegations that surfaced in the Shambhala Buddhist community and explores the power imbalances in guru-student relationships. We ask why this keeps happening in spiritual communities around the world and hear from Shambhala's board of directors.

The organization says the Sakyong is now teaching only outside the Shambhala organization, but current and former members dispute that claim. They point out that the Sakyong is still prominently identified on the organization's website as their top-billed teacher and "temporal and spiritual director of Shambhala." They also say there are numerous arms and multiple legal entities that comprise Shambhala, and that the Sakyong was set to teach, for example, at a 2020 event planned prior to the pandemic at Dechen Chöling, a retreat centre in France that is clearly identified as part of Shambhala.

Phil Cass, a member of the board of directors for Shambhala, told Tapestry the organization has a whole new body of trustees in charge, and it has implemented extensive training as well as a new code of care and conduct.

But Ullman said the alleged abuse started decades ago, when the organization was much newer.

II.

Shambhala became established in Canada following a journey that took its founder around the globe.

Trungpa was among a small group of Tibetan monks who spent nine perilous months crossing the Himalayas into India following China's 1950 invasion of Tibet. There, the Dalai Lama appointed him spiritual adviser to a group of young monks.

Trungpa studied at Oxford University and then moved to the United States in 1970, travelling around for a time before settling in Boulder. There, he became spiritual teacher to a group of artists, hippies and seekers, and established the teachings and organization that would come to be known as Shambhala.

Ullman said that from the early days, the organization was set up in a way that centralized — and deified — its leader.

"These kinds of teachings are established on what's called a mandala principle, which is basically something that has a centre, and then everything radiates out from that," said Ullman. "And [Trungpa] was the centre…. It was his mind at the centre of the mandala, which theoretically is supposed to permeate everything so that you have a most uplifted society."

Ullman said Trungpa set up his household as "a court."

"Students would do all of the roles of service as a way of being near the teacher and, you know, practising the teachings as a societal kind of structure."

Some would work in the organization full-time, but many others would study there part-time in a way that could be likened to belonging to a church, synagogue or other religious congregation.

Today, there are more than 100 Shambhala meditation centres around the world, including locations all across Canada.

Ullman said boundaries between Trungpa and his students were often non-existent. "I was one of the women who had an intimate relationship with him, although that's not saying a heck of a lot, because ... many, many people did," said Ullman.

"There [were] all these young, pretty women and that culture, that also seeped into the students, so that young women coming into the community were like prey."

When Ullman declined Trungpa's proposal of marriage, their sexual relationship began to peter out, but she remained part of his court. "I continued being one of the servers and I was one of the close ones who would be with him and help him get dressed and all that kind of thing."

Concerned that the U.S. was becoming too materialistic, Trungpa decided in the mid-1980s to move the headquarters to Nova Scotia. This was the result of a visit to the province, during which he determined that Nova Scotia had a positive energy that reminded him of Tibet. He built a monastery, called Gampo Abbey, near the northern tip of Cape Breton.

Trungpa asked a number of his students, including Ullman, to move to the Maritime province with him.

By now married to one of the Shambhala leaders and a mother of two, Ullman was able to move to Canada on a student visa. Having previously passed entrance exams for law school, she applied to the law school at Dalhousie University and got in. "It was almost like I was going to law school in order to get a student visa to live there."

But Trungpa died of liver failure in 1987, most likely due to his excessive drinking, which was well known in the community.

His son, Mipham Rinpoche, had been studying in India for a few years. In 1995, he was asked by a group of Tibetan lamas to become the Sakyong — which means Earth Protector — and lead the Shambhala organization.

When the Sakyong took over after a period of interim leadership, Ullman said she initially had reservations about him being a strong enough teacher. Ultimately, she said, "I felt like it was worthwhile to support him in order to carry on the organization and the teachings that his father had started."

Ullman said that "as the years went by … he became a better teacher, and I became close to him. I was one of his secretaries for a while. I travelled with him."

She said he also had multiple sexual relationships with women in the organization. "And then at some point he met his future wife," said Ullman. "Many people thought, well, that was it. You know, he proclaimed his faithfulness and love for her and he was going to be a family man.'"

In 2006, the Sakyong married Tseyang Palmo, a Tibetan princess whose father is the leader of another Buddhist movement. The union was celebrated as a Buddhist "royal wedding," with 1,300 guests gathering in Halifax for the three-day event.

Ullman said that because the alleged behaviour was hidden, the Sakyong's sexual misconduct didn't fit his public persona as a married Buddhist dignitary. This contributed to the general disbelief when people started to come forward with allegations.

"Some of these things that have come out ... aren't believed by a lot of people — that he was messing around with other people, and also that he had a serious drinking issue," said Ullman.

"A lot of people just said, 'Well, I never saw him that way.'"

In an open letter to the Shambhala community after the allegations surfaced in 2018, the Sakyong acknowledged he'd had relationships with women in the community. It read, "I have recently learned that some of these women have shared experiences of feeling harmed as a result of these relationships. I am now making a public apology." 

III.

Andrea Winn's allegations of abuse in the Shambhala community emerged with the first of three Buddhist Project Sunshine reports, which was published in February 2018.

That's when Carol Merchasin, a retired Philadelphia employment lawyer who specialized in workplace misconduct investigations, got in touch with her.

"I suggested that she ask Shambhala to do an investigation, that that's really what the next step needed to be," said Merchasin, who is now living in New Jersey. When Winn told her that Shambhala leadership were no longer speaking to her, Merchasin offered to work pro bono with her as an independent investigator for Buddhist Project Sunshine.

Merchasin began to investigate the claims that were considered current, meaning the alleged abuse had taken place within the last 25 years, in order to determine whether there was definitive evidence of hidden sexual misconduct in the Shambhala community.

Within the first 10 days of her investigation, a woman came forward to ask if Merchasin would be investigating sexual misconduct of the Sakyong himself. Merchasin said it was the first time either she or Winn knew of allegations linked not just to instructors and senior members of the organization but to Shambhala's leader.

While Merchasin was investigating those allegations, two other women came forward. Those findings were published in June 2018, in the first of the two investigative reports Merchasin helped Winn produce.

"It involved those first three women, all three of them with credible corroborated allegations against the Sakyong," Merchasin said.

This was not just about the Sakyong and sexual misconduct, but there was also institutional betrayal.Carol Merchasin

The lawyer said she'd sometimes spend three months communicating with the women just to build trust before they'd agree to answer questions about their experiences.

"There were probably eight or nine that I interviewed in terms of misconduct allegations against the Sakyong," Merchasin said. "As more women came forward, it weighed on us that we were carrying the stories of these people who had been silenced. Because what became clear was that this was not just about the Sakyong and sexual misconduct, but there was also institutional betrayal."

Merchasin said that "in one way or another, the power structure has turned [these women] away. The power structure has said, 'We don't want to hear this. We don't believe you. We're not going to do anything about it.'"

In cases like these, victims are then prompted to look for other kinds of power, she said.

"It's often media that really try to shine a light on what is happening in some of these communities and the kind of reform and accountability that needs to be there."

It's been said that when abuse takes place within a spiritual community — where people specifically go to find meaning and understanding of their place in the world — it affects victims in a particularly damaging way.

Ullman said she worries about others just joining a spiritual community being taken advantage of in this way. "You have to open your whole heart and mind and you're so grateful because it's all amazing and good and you feel part of something. And having that collapse is very devastating."

When her own marriage to a senior Shambhala teacher was in crisis, Ullman said she felt the community abandoned her.

"I loved the work. I loved the people, but I was also kind of in hell a lot of the time," she said. "It got so bad that I finally left the marriage."

Ullman still wanted to do the next retreat at the centre in Tatamagouche. She asked her husband — from whom she was by then separated — not to attend, so she could take part in the retreat without the stress of their marital breakdown. He refused.

I was losing my marriage, I was losing my community. I was fairly prominent. It just didn't dawn on me that nobody would care.Patricia Ullman

"So I started asking within Shambhala to help me. And that went up from the local care and conduct group to the international care and conduct group, to the president of Shambhala, who was a friend. None of them felt they could help me … They gathered their wagons around him."

In retrospect, she thinks she had a psychological breakdown. "I was losing my marriage, I was losing my community. I was fairly prominent. It just didn't dawn on me that nobody would care.

"Ullman wrote a few letters to the Sakyong, who she had once been close to, but he never replied. And so, after 40 years with the community, she left.

"I still thought somebody would help me figure out how to continue on, but nobody has ever contacted me to this day."

IV.

When the allegations against Shambala came to light in 2018, it wasn't the first time a Buddhist organization had been tied to alleged abuse.

Academics Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig are collaborating on a book called Sex, Abuse and the Sangha, which explores alleged sex abuse within Buddhist organizations, like the kind that led to the shuttering of the Against the Stream Meditation Society in 2018.

Although Shambhala is not one of their case studies, Langenberg and Gleig have interviewed a number of former Shambhala members as part of their research.

"One of the things that we have been paying a lot of attention to is the way that Buddhist doctrines get kind of brought into the process of justifying the abuse or somehow making it OK in the community, or somehow making it disappear in the community," said Langenberg, an associate professor of religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Doctrine often is sort of brought in and, you could say, weaponized."

Langenberg cites the example of the Buddhist concept of "beginner's mind" — "an idea that has to do with emptiness and has to do with you not kind of spending a lot of your mental energies making judgments, but kind of holding a place of unknowing."

In interviews she and Gleig did for the book, Langenberg said, "we've heard people bring that in as a way to not come down and take a position when there have been allegations of sexual abuse. So we'll hear something like, 'Well, I don't know what the facts are and therefore I choose not to judge.' And sometimes it's legitimate … but a lot of times, there's a lot of information upon which you could kind of take a stand — for instance, to support victims."

There's some kind of recognition that abuse happened, and then it's like, let's move on quickly to forgiveness. You know, that's another violence to survivors.Ann Gleig

Community cohesion is often prioritized at the expense of survivors, said Gleig, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

"We realized that there has been, in some cases, a tremendous pressure on survivors to forgive, you know. There's some kind of recognition that abuse happened, and then it's like, let's move on quickly to forgiveness. You know, that's another violence to survivors."

Fear also gets in the way of people coming forward, she said.

She said there's "cosmic fear" of speaking up against the guru because "it's going to have consequences for your spiritual unfolding over many lifetimes." Then there's "the fear of retribution from the community … especially when the teacher is so beloved."

She said there are plenty of examples of senior teachers attacking women who have spoken up against abuse. "Often we find this tremendous naiveté amongst some Buddhist practitioners, of like, 'Why didn't they speak up earlier?' or 'Why didn't they say no?' I mean, it's such a naive and limited understanding of the power contexts — [there's] conventional earthly power that we all know, but then there's also the kind of spiritual layers to it."

Toronto author Matthew Remski has studied abuse within a number of spiritual communities, including Buddhist centres and the Ashtanga yoga movement, some of which is described in his book Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond.

"There's a kind of deceptive way in which the sexual abuse is rationalized or spiritualized by a culture that believes that it's beyond it, and that believes that somehow the intrusiveness of the teacher, the demands that the teacher makes of the student's person and their body, is somehow part of a spiritual process," Remski said.

"Very often, the survivor of abuse in these circumstances spends a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly happened, why it felt so terrible, why they were told that it was part of their awakening, why no one came to their aid."

Victims may also try to ignore alarm bells that go off when the abuse is happening because of the central idea that ego and the critical mind are obstacles on the road to enlightenment, he said.

"There is a very beautiful and haunting part of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that deals with the absence of essential reality, of what we know as being the self," said Remski.

"You know, that the ego's structure that I carry around and that I interrelate with the world through is largely illusory, that it's passing, that I've constructed it out of habits and circumstances … This kind of mask that I wear in the world."

Remski said that's a very powerful idea.

"And it can also be really weaponized against the person who is suddenly thrown into an environment in which their basic feelings, their basic responses to stimulus are being labelled as signs of their delusion rather than, you know, reasonable responses to stress or to stimulus."

Carol Penner, assistant professor of theological studies at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ont., said that while abuse in the Catholic Church is most widely talked about, "there's sexual misconduct in every religious organization."

"I think whenever people have power over other people, they can take advantage of them and abuse them. That's just the reality."

Penner told Tapestry that spiritual groups have fallen behind other organizations, such as the professional bodies that regulate medicine and teaching, in putting safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

Abuse looks particularly bad on religious organizations because of the strong moral teachings they espouse, she said. "So if there is any place that should be safe in our society, it is a religious organization. And so when misconduct happens there, it's such a shock and a betrayal."

LISTEN: In Tapestry's special, part two looks at sexual abuse in spiritual communities from the perspective of survivors. It explores what tends to happen to survivors who speak out against their spiritual leaders and groundbreaking ways we can listen to abuse survivors who choose to remain silent.

V.

Philip Cass, who joined Shambhala's board of directors in May 2020, told Tapestry's Mary Hynes that the organization's original board of trustees stepped down in 2018 and asked the Sakyong to do the same.

After the Sakyong stepped away from his leadership role in July 2018, the organization's governing council appointed the Halifax law firm Wickwire Holm to conduct an independent investigation into the matter.

In February 2019, the firm determined the Sakyong had made inappropriate sexual advances against two female students.

"There were numerous investigations," said Cass. "We looked at the issue of harm. And since then, a lot of work has been done to create policies and procedures for the care and conduct of people in our community."

A new care and conduct policy just came into effect in February. As a result, Cass said anyone who comes forward with an issue of harm will now have clear pathways for accessing designated people for support and for the resources they need to file a complaint if they choose to do so.

The new policy requires the development of a regional and international council of counsellors "to basically intervene and investigate and, if necessary, adjudicate claims of harm."

He said that "those people are just being recruited now and being trained."

Cass said the organization has also provided training for all Shambhala leaders, raising awareness of power, sexual harm, trauma and healing, and is now conducting training on gender dynamics.

He said the Sakyong is currently teaching outside of the Shambhala organization, but his photo and bio were still on the organization's website as this story was being completed. Cass said that regardless of the Sakyong's rarified lineage, if he ever returned to teach with Shambhala, "he would be required to work under these care and conduct policies and procedures as well."

He also said he would "take a look at" why the Sakyong's photo remains on the website.

Cass said there are some members who believe that without the Sakyong, there is no Shambhala. "There are people who are his students, and who continue to be his students, and want to be able to continue to learn from him."

However, Cass added that "the majority of the feedback we got was that he should not come back and teach. So we're in that discussion and in that assessment as you and I talk right now."

Yet prior to the pandemic, the Sakyong was scheduled to teach at a June 2020 Shambala retreat in France, at a centre called Dechen Chöling that is identified as part of Shambhala. Its website says "Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, lineage holder of Shambhala, was very excited about the selection of this site over other spaces considered in Europe."

Tapestry asked the Sakyong for an interview as part of this special report; he declined. His office sent a statement that reads, in part:

"The Sakyong will not be offering further comment on these issues. He has repeatedly apologized for his behavior, both publicly and privately, and has acknowledged the harm he caused. The Sakyong believes, and has taught, that like all human beings, teachers have faults and virtues, and that he is no different."

There is this tendency to think the spiritual framework has all of the answers.Ann Gleig

Langenberg and Gleig say there are things people can do to protect themselves from being taken advantage of — in any capacity — within a spiritual community.

"There is this tendency to think the spiritual framework has all of the answers," said Gleig. "And I've yet to meet a community, religious or secular, that has a complete map of life. So I just say [to potential participants] remain open to other sources of knowledge and expertise, especially related to power and psychodynamics and also gender dynamics."

Langenberg also suggests that anyone interested in joining such a community should research it using outside sources.

"Find out what their history is. It doesn't mean that, you know, you can't go to a Zen community [where] a past teacher was involved in some abuse. It may be that the community has changed or the community is different and has a different leadership. But no, don't be naive."

RESOURCES FOR SURVIVORS:

Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868

Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-833-900-1010

First Nations and Inuit Hope for Wellness Help Line: 1‑855‑242-3310

Crisis Services Canada: 1-833-456-4566, or text 45645

Credits

CBC Radio Tapestry's Basic Goodness show producers: Rosie Fernandez, Mary Hynes, Mary-Catherine McIntosh, Erin Noel and Arman Aghbali

Copy editor: Andre Mayer | Lead digital producer: Sinisa Jolic | Digital producer: Ruby Buiza

https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/tapestry/shambhala

SURVIVORS OF AN INTERNATIONAL BUDDHIST CULT SHARE THEIR STORIES

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 / SOCIETY

Survivors of an International Buddhist Cult Share Their Stories

An investigation into decades of abuse at Shambhala International

MATTHEW REMSKI
The Walrus
Sep. 28, 2020

ON APRIL 4, 1987, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche lay dying in the old Halifax Infirmary. He was forty-seven. To the medical staff, Trungpa likely resembled any other patient admitted for palliative care. But, to the inner circle gathered around his bed and for tens of thousands of followers, he was a brilliant philosopher-king fading into sainthood. They believed that, through his reconstruction of "Shambhala"—the mythical Tibetan kingdom on which he'd modelled his New Age community, creating one of the most influential Buddhist organizations in the West—he had innovated a spiritual cure for a postmodern age, a series of precepts to help Westerners meditate their way out of apathy and egotism.

Standing by Trungpa's deathbed was Thomas Rich, his spiritual successor. Rich was joined by Diana Mukpo (formerly Diana Pybus), who had married Trungpa in 1970, a few months after she turned sixteen. Also present was Trungpa's twenty-four-year-old son, Mipham Rinpoche. While the cohort chanted and prayed, twenty-five-year-old Leslie Hays listened from outside the door. Trungpa had taken her as one of his seven spiritual wives two years earlier. After being called in to say a brief goodbye, Hays walked out into the evening, secretly relieved Trungpa was dying. She would no longer be serving his sexual demands; enduring his pinches, punches, and kicks; or listening to him drunkenly recount hallucinated conversations with the long-dead sages of medieval Tibet.

Trungpa stopped breathing at 8:05 p.m. His attendants bathed his body in saffron water; painted prayers on small squares of paper and fixed them to his eyes, nostrils, and mouth; then wheeled the gurney into an ambulance to bring him home for a ritual wake. The cortège drove south, through the chilly night, toward Point Pleasant Park, the forested tip of the Halifax Peninsula. They pulled into a circular drive at 545 Young Avenue, a mansion dubbed "The Kalapa Court" after the fabled Shambhala seat of power.

Devotees rolled Trungpa's body into the living room, which had been mostly cleared of furniture except for a Tibetan throne. They dressed the body in gold brocade and wrenched its legs into a crossed position to prop it up in a final meditation. In his death notice to the community, Rich stated that the guru had attained "parinirvana"—a transcendant state in which he would be free from the cycle of rebirth. (Years later, Trungpa's personal doctor would cite liver disease from alcohol abuse as the cause of death.) "We vow to perpetuate your world," Rich wrote.

Following Trungpa's death, his Halifax congregation and hundreds of pilgrims flocked to Kalapa for five days of visitation. Temple guards in full military uniform admitted mourners around the clock. They filed into the dim room, through clouds of juniper incense, to chant, meditate, and bow in prostration. They believed that Trungpa's consciousness was expanding into the infinite. One group member recalls throwing the windows open to the cold, wet air as a funk set in.

Some mourners knew Trungpa from his lectures on meditation. Others would have been enthralled by his 1973 book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which has sold 200,000 copies. Others still had likely attended the opening of his Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, in summer 1974, when 1,500 spiritual seekers had arrived to listen to him lecture beside countercultural heroes like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Many in the room in Halifax had uprooted their lives to live close to Trungpa, to work in his centres or transcribe his teachings. Some had pledged him their present and future lives through the ritual bonds central to Tantric religion. However they'd come, and for whatever reason they'd stayed, they were the core of what would become Shambhala International, a thriving network of more than 200 meditation centres and retreat destinations in dozens of countries. Headquartered in Nova Scotia, the organization's motto is "Making Enlightened Society Possible."

These days, Trungpa's kingdom presents less like an "enlightened society" than it does a longitudinal study of intergenerational abuse and of how thin the line between religion and cult can be. In the thirty-three years since her husband's death, Leslie Hays has felt her relief sharpen into fury. She has now emerged at the forefront of a movement of ex-followers who say that Trungpa's public image as a spiritual genius has been used to hide a legacy of deception, exploitation, behavioural control, and systemic abuse. Their activism has organized around Trungpa's son, Mipham, who eventually inherited his father's empire and, in 2018, began to face his own public allegations of physical violence and sexual assault.

Over the course of two years, I've interviewed close to fifty ex-Shambhala members. They have told me stories of every type of mistreatment imaginable, from emotional manipulation and extreme neglect to molestation and rape—stories that turn Shambhala's brand narrative, with its promises of utopia, upside down. Posting on the Facebook page created to support survivors like herself, Hays has shortened the group's name simply to "Sham."

NEARLY 2,500 YEARS AGO, Buddhism began, in ancient India, as an austere movement of self-discovery that preached meditation and meticulous attention to ethics. Early converts radically rejected the classism and ritualism of existing religions. Today, Buddhist teachings hold that the mind is the first and central source of conflict and that meditation can help a person see reality more clearly, past their anxious desires. This, it is claimed, can decrease or even extinguish cycles of violence.

Mass-market visions of this modern Buddhism tend to orbit around stately figures, like the Dalai Lama and Thích Nhất Hạnh, the antiwar cleric from Vietnam nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967. American popularizers include Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, who co-founded the Insight Meditation Society, in Massachusetts, in 1975. Their professional trainings helped commodify and suburbanize ancient meditation techniques into secular wellness tools for use in self-help psychotherapy and even business coaching.

Trungpa's organization grew in tandem with this popular interest. But his own reputation was built on the idea of enlightened chaos. He introduced his recruits to "crazy wisdom," the practice of using bizarre and sometimes abusive methods to jolt devotees into higher states of being. In a series of 1983 sermons, he compared the attainment of spiritual wisdom to the act of rape. His butler recounted, in a memoir, Trungpa torturing a dog as a metaphor for how the unenlightened should be taught the uncompromising truths of Buddhism. Trungpa also taught a technique called "transmutation," by which an enlightened person transforms the common or even the disgraceful aspects of their life into the sublime, thereby purifying themselves. The Tantric texts, logic, and ritual by which transmutation happens are all meant to be kept secret—which worked in Trungpa's favour. His true ministry, if openly known, would hardly have ingratiated him to buttoned-down Nova Scotians.

Trungpa first scoped out Atlantic Canada in 1977. He travelled in the guise of a Bhutanese prince, making his disciples, during dinner, wear tuxedoes or evening gowns and white gloves. He loved the region's remoteness, isolation, and rain. Trungpa found in Nova Scotia the perfect setting for a kind of spiritual invasion. It was sparsely populated, with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Citizens were dissatisfied with local government and ready for something new. He observed that Nova Scotians were psychologically "cooperative" and "starved" and opined that they needed "more energy to be put on them." Back in Boulder, he declared that he could feel the same goodness in the earth in Nova Scotia that he remembered from Tibet, which he had fled in 1959.

Trungpa started frequenting Halifax as his eastern seat after devotees acquired the Young Avenue property. By the time Trungpa died, around 800 of his most ardent followers—mostly young, well-educated, middle-class white Americans—had settled on the East Coast life, laying down roots from Halifax to Pleasant Bay, a small community in Cape Breton, where they helped establish Gampo Abbey, now presided over by one one of Trungpa's most famous former students, self-help author Pema Chödrön. Followers opened businesses in the burgeoning wellness sector, working as massage therapists, acupuncturists, and psychotherapists. In the summer, they gathered for communal events, like "seminary," where Trungpa would teach Buddhist philosophy for days on end, and "encampment," where members would march in parades and sing songs around campfires. Over the years, Maritimers joined the movement, drawn to its secular accessibility and devotional intensity, and soon came the first generation of born-and-raised Halifax Shambhala Buddhists, who joined the ranks of other so-called Dharma Brats in the US.

It was a community in thrall to Trungpa, a leader with an authoritarian streak whose eccentricities were typically passed off as transmutation. When he asked his dishevelled devotees to cut their hair and become professional, Trungpa—who had his suits hand-tailored on London's Savile Row—was transmuting their late-hippie immaturity. When he dressed up like Idi Amin or rode a white stallion while wearing a pith helmet and phony war medals, he was transmuting the aggression of militarism. When he insisted that his courtiers learn Downton Abbey–style dinner etiquette, he was transmuting the colonial pretension that had almost destroyed the Asian wisdom culture he embodied. On the grandest scale, Trungpa saw Shambhala as a transmutation of the nation-state itself—complete with a national anthem, ministers, equestrian displays, an army, a treasury, specially minted coinage, and photo IDs.

But Trungpa's transmutations didn't stop there. They were also used to rationalize the sexual abuse he committed against countless women students—abuse that devotees justified as Trungpa transmuting the repressed Christian prudery of North America and turning lust into insight. Public evidence of this abuse was first published in a local Boulder magazine in 1979, but the most public and credible accusations came from Hays on Facebook, starting in 2018. Hays remembers Trungpa demanding women and girls at all hours of the day and night, some of them teenagers. He was not only prone to outbursts of physical violence but, according to Hays, her job as a "spiritual wife" (traditionally a consort for ritualized sexual meditations) involved offering Trungpa bumps of cocaine, which she remembers his lieutenants pretending was either a secret ritual substance or vitamin D. Hays's entire relationship with Trungpa testifies to how he used his charisma to prey on followers.

Hays grew up in a Minnesota farm town and moved to Boulder, in 1981, to study journalism at the University of Colorado. She was twenty. Three years later, she took a nanny job with a couple who were devotees of Trungpa, moving into their house. She was asked to attend a summertime Shambhala training camp so that she'd be more aligned with the family's values. That winter, the couple was hosting a wedding that Trungpa himself would be attending. They regaled her with stories of his "unfathomable" brilliance and asked her to prepare to meet him with meditations that involved visualizing him as divine. They took her shopping for clothes and taught her to walk in heels. In our conversation, Hays remembers being impressionable at that age and thinking it would be fun "to meet an enlightened meditation master from Tibet."

At the wedding, Trungpa lavished attention on Hays, then showed up at her employer's house the next day to propose that they marry. Hays was baffled, so he invited her to his home for a get-to-know-you date. Guards ushered her into his bedroom, where he was waiting for her, naked. That same night, he asked her to marry him again. Stunned, she agreed, believing it to be an honour, and for a while, there was a honeymoon-like feeling between them. But, after the first week, Hays told me, things started to go wrong. In the bedroom, Hays says, he would use a vibrator until she screamed out in pain. Then Trungpa started to punch and kick her.

"What Trungpa did," says Liz Craig, "was create an environment for emotional and sexual harm in which nobody was accountable for their actions." Craig worked as a nanny in Trungpa's household. "If he'd been publicly violent, it would have been easier to identify him as harmful and Shambhala as a cult."

Another ex-Shambhala student, who asked to remain anonymous, knows of several women Trungpa physically assaulted besides her. "He pinched me to the point of leaving dark bruises," she says. I reached her at her office in Nova Scotia, where she runs a practice as a sexual-violence trauma therapist. She described one summer-long event in 1985 at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (now the Shambhala Mountain Center), north of Boulder. She was twenty-three at the time and was recruited to cook and clean in Trungpa's residence. Trungpa's "henchmen," as she calls them, would circulate through the participants to find the women he desired. "The entire scene around him was sexualized," she says. "Trungpa was basically the king of the universe, and any contact with him was a blessing that was going to guarantee your enlightenment and eternal salvation."

It wasn't only women who were caught in Shambhala's abusive culture. Ex-member Michal Bandac, now living in Germany, says that, in the 1980s, Shambhala adults introduced him to cocaine use when he was twelve. The scene was considered safe, Bandac says, because they were taught that, "according to Buddhism, the children are always better than their parents." Bandac's mother, Patricia, was a senior Shambhala teacher for thirty years and the director of the Nova Scotia retreat centre. Since leaving Shambhala in 2015, she has struggled to understand how the group affected her family. While she wasn't aware of her son's exposure to cocaine, she does remember him telling her about Shambhala women in their thirties luring him into his first sexual experiences. "I was kind of shocked," she says. "But I didn't do anything about it. It was so normalized. There was statutory rape going on all over the place."

ABUSE CONTINUED after Trungpa's death. In 1989, the New York Times reported that Trungpa's spiritual successor, Thomas Rich, had been having unprotected sex with an unknown number of men and women while being HIV positive. This not only had gone on for years—Rich was suspected to have contracted the illness in 1985—but was likely known to senior leadership. Moreover, according to a 1990 article, Rich's sexual history suggested such encounters weren't always consensual. The media coverage forced Rich, in California at this time, into exile. After Kier Craig—Rich's student and the brother of Liz, the Trungpa nanny—died of HIV/AIDS, likely contracted from Rich, even more Shambhalians fled the community. Program attendance and membership donations plummeted. The legal entities that held Shambhala's assets were dissolved to avoid liability.

In the early 1990s, Tibetan clerics moved to stabilize Shambhala by certifying Trungpa's son, Mipham, as a reincarnated master and the rightful heir to his father. It was an unlikely fit. Although in his thirties, Mipham didn't have any of the expected monastic training and was not known for his charisma. Nevertheless, in 1995, Mipham was enthroned as sovereign over Shambhala and dubbed with one of his father's own honorifics: "Sakyong," which roughly translates to "Earth Ruler."

As Sakyong, Mipham's management approach was distinctly corporate. By 2002, he'd appointed the former public-relations head of Amnesty International as Shambhala's new president. He replaced the mostly male administration with a more gender-balanced and international board of directors. Between 1999 and 2018, Mipham's restructuring helped Shambhala's global membership grow from under 7,000 to 14,000. Members participated in programs and training at outposts around the world, drawing an annual revenue of $18 million (US) in North America alone.

In the early 2000s, memories of Trungpa and Rich's acts of sexual abuse seemed to have faded. Chödrön, Shamabhala's self-help superstar based out of Cape Breton, lit out on an extraordinary run of mass-media success, appearing on Bill Moyers' PBS miniseries Faith and Reason and eventually selling more than 1.2 million copies of her books in eighteen languages. Mipham also moved to shield what were reputed to be the most mystical elements of his father's teaching content behind a pay-wall. He developed a pyramid-style series of training sessions and ceremonies only he could preside over as a kind of papal gatekeeper. Sporting brocade robes, Mipham came into his own as a regal figure, giving ritual initiations to new and old members and creating newer levels of secret practices for devotees to invest in. In 2005, he married Khandro Tseyang—the daughter of a Tibetan spirit medium who claims a royal pedigree. From the outside, things seemed to be looking up. But it was during these same Camelot years that Mipham allegedly assaulted attendants and students.

One of those students was Julia Howell, born into Shambhala in Nova Scotia in 1984. For children who grew up in the community, the promise and betrayal of their upbringing are difficult to separate. Sometimes, Trungpa's world felt like a happy place. Some describe loving the free-range summer "Sun Camps." They were consistently told that they were special—the "first Western Buddhists," who would both embody and evangelize a new age. They had been given early access to authentic Buddhism, so they were told, and the teachings would take care of them. They were encouraged to internalize the group's meditation techniques and use them whenever they lost their feeling of "basic goodness."

When Howell was twenty-four, her mother was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer. That fall, Howell applied for the Tantric training that was said to eventually lead to full citizenship within the mystical world of Shambhala. Her aim was partly to prepare herself for the coming loss and partly to join her mother in practices to prepare for death. Howell's initiations involved vowing to perceive Mipham—now the group's leader—as the gatekeeper to enlightenment. When her mother died, in 2010, Howell practiced with an intensity that matched her grief. Her ardour drew her closer to Mipham's inner circle.

In 2011, Howell went to a party at the Kalapa Court, the enclave that Trungpa founded in Halifax. The occasion was Mipham's daughter's first birthday party. Howell says that, after his wife had gone to bed and most of the guests had left, Mipham, drunk, assaulted her. "I felt frozen, without agency," she says. "I had taken a vow at seminary to follow his instructions like commands." Alone, confused, and grieving her mother, Howell plunged deeper into her practice to make sense of it all.

"This liturgy embodies the magical heart of Shambhala," announces the text Howell used. Written by Mipham, it proposes that the gifts of Tantric practice flow from developing a pure view of the master, then merging with him, body and mind. A key part of the ritual involves a purification fantasy. Howell was instructed to visualize light streaming down from a deity seated at the crown of her head. The light was washing away the karma of negative emotions, seen as dirt and muck pouring downward, out of her body and into the earth. Inevitably, this brought up traumatic memories associated with the assault. "It was an exercise in self-shaming," says Howell. Her practice included visualizing Mipham, in royal attire, hovering above her head, then morphing into a fantastical bird, who entered her body and descended to dissolve into light in her chest. Should another assault happen, rather than experiencing it as a violation, she would will herself to see Mipham as the Buddha. "I was really training to think that rape is not rape," she says.

After more than three years of trying to interpret the assault and justify Mipham's behaviour, Howell decided to face him. It took several months to get the meeting through underlings. Mipham offered her a weak apology "about the whole thing," as Howell remembers. She recalls him performing a healing ritual for her, then handing her a mala—a sort of Tibetan rosary—and saying, "This is for your practice."

Through the summer and fall of 2017, stories about similar abuse ripped into other spiritual communities. In July, eight former attendants of the late Sogyal Rinpoche, a celebrated Buddhist teacher and the author of the bestselling Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, published an open letter describing decades of physical, sexual, and financial abuse by the religious leader. In November, Karen Rain alleged on Facebook that renowned yoga teacher Krishna Pattabhi Jois had sexually assaulted her and other women under the guise of "postural adjustments." The children of Shambhala were watching. Andrea Winn, who had lived most of her life in Trungpa's kingdom, decided it was time to speak out. (As Winn declined an interview, what follows is from publicly available records.)

"Something has gone tragically wrong in the Shambhala community," wrote Winn in "Project Sunshine: Final Report," a feat of guerrilla journalism published online in February 2018. The report featured five anonymous testimonies of assault, rape, and abuse that implicated unnamed Shambhala senior leaders as either enablers or perpetrators. "We have allowed abuse within our community for nearly four decades, and it is time to take practical steps to end it." Winn, now fifty-three, included details about her own childhood sexual abuse by "multiple" community members and how, when she spoke out as a young adult, she was shunned. Her healing process led her to a counselling-psychology degree specializing in relational trauma. "One thing that is clear to me is that a single woman can be silenced," she writes. "However, a group of organized concerned citizens will be a completely different ball game."

Shambhala's old guard likely knew that Winn's report was coming. Three days before Winn published, Diana Mukpo, Trungpa's wife by legal marriage, posted a letter to Shambhala's community news website attempting to discredit Winn and the project, calling it a personal attack on her family. "When I first heard about Project Sunshine," Mukpo wrote, "I thought it would be a wonderful way to embark on this important process. But now that I've seen its connection to the spreading of inaccurate, misleading facts, I no longer have faith in its ability to assist with this important task in an unbiased and honest manner."

Winn teamed up with a retired lawyer, Carol Merchasin, who worked through the spring of 2018 to corroborate testimonies for a second, more explosive report. This round focused on allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against Shambhala's leader, Mipham. Merchasin recounts that they reached out to the Shambhala Kalapa council to present the allegations prior to publishing and to encourage the organization to conduct an investigation. No one from the council would meet with the whistleblowers, but, according to Merchasin, the council hired a mediator who threatened her with legal action days before she and Winn planned to release the second report online on June 28.

Soon after the report was published, Mipham paused his teaching activities and issued a vaguely apologetic statement announcing that he was committing to a shared project of healing. "This is not easy work," he concluded, "and we cannot give up on each other. For me, it always comes back to feeling my own heart, my own humanity, and my own genuineness. It is with this feeling that I express to all of you my deep love and appreciation. I am committed to engaging in this process with you."

Shambhala leaders could no longer dismiss allegations of long-standing systemic abuse.

But Winn and Merchasin released a third report, that August, that included two further accounts alleging that Mipham had abused his power. Facing pressure from local and international media coverage, Shambhala decided to launch an independent investigation. The investigator's conclusion, released in February 2019, was that Mipham had caused a lot of harm, and they encouraged him to take responsibility and "be directly involved in the healing process." Two weeks after the findings were released, six former personal attendants to Mipham came forward with an open letter about their years of serving him. They described his chronic alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct, his profligate spending, and his physical assaults against Shambhala members. Six days later, forty-two of the organization's teachers posted their own open letter, calling on Mipham to step down "for the foreseeable future."

Suddenly, Shambhala leaders could no longer dismiss allegations of long-standing systemic abuse. The community's Dharma Brats—those of Winn's generation and later who'd grown up in the kingdom—now had a lot to say and a place to say it.

SOMETIME AFTER the third report, Mipham fled Canada, with his wife and three young daughters, for India and Nepal. In February 2019, he issued a carefully worded acknowledgment of the abuse crisis, declaring that he would retreat from his teaching and administrative duties. "I want to express wholeheartedly how sorry I feel about all that has happened," Mipham lamented. "I understand that I am the main source of that suffering and confusion and want to again apologize for this. I am deeply sorry."

For more than a year, Mipham did in fact lie low, avoiding public events. But what is expedient in public-relations terms carries a steep price for Tantric devotees. For them, Mipham's legal and administrative standing pales against the belief that his very body carries his father's perfect revelation: the ritual keys to the Shambhala kingdom. It's a Faustian bargain: they must petition for Mipham's return regardless of what they know of him and despite the repercussions for people like Julia Howell. For those who believe that Trungpa's revelation was messianic, the double bind is even tighter. It is said that Tantric teachings can be given only if devotees supplicate to the master for them. If they don't literally beg for Mipham to come back, they'll be personally responsible for the death of the enlightened society that was meant to save the world.

Last December, Mipham sent an announcement out over Shambhala networks featuring a cryptic love poem to his devotees: "Like a mist, you are always present. / Like a dream, you appear but are elusive. / Like a mountain, you remain an immovable presence in my life." The rest of the letter offered family and business news and bemoaned the state of the world.

Two weeks later, a newsletter from the Shambhala board pledged support for Mipham's return to ritual duty. The letter explained that 125 devotees had requested that Mipham confer the "Rigden Abhisheka"—an elite level of Shambhala teaching—in a bid to restore legitimacy to the damaged brand. In response, the Shambhala centre in France invited Mipham for the summer of 2020.

Pema Chödrön responded by stepping down from her clergy position. In a letter posted to the group's news service in January, Chödrön said that she was "disheartened" by Mipham's announced return. She had expected him to show compassion toward the survivors of his abuse, she wrote, and to do "some deep inner work on himself." But it was the support from the board, she added, that distressed her more. "How can we return to business as usual?" she wrote. "I find it discouraging that the bravery of those who had the courage to speak out does not seem to be effecting more significant change in the path forward."

The months that followed Chödrön's letter have seen stock in Trungpa's legacy continue to plummet. Shambhala centres in Frankfurt and New York issued rebukes of the board's decision to support Mipham's return. The board countered with a long-winded affirmation to steadying the course with reforms that stopped short of disinviting Mipham. And they kept fundraising.

Group members were further rattled when Michael Smith, a fifty-five-year-old former member of the Boulder Shambhala group, pled guilty to assaulting a thirteen-year-old girl he'd met through the community in the late 1990s. A similar case against William Lloyd Karelis, a seventy-three-year-old former meditation instructor for the Boulder Shambhala community, is set to go to trial next spring. Karelis is accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old girl who had been assigned to him as a student in the 1990s. In February, the Larimer County Sheriff 's Office closed a more than year-long investigation into "possible criminal activity" at the Colorado centres. They released a redacted file of their interviews with ex-members, which corroborated several of the abuse testimonies published by Winn and Merchasin, including Howell's account of Mipham assaulting her in Halifax. No charges were filed.

On March 11, when the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Mipham was leading a Tantric meditation retreat at a monastery in Nepal. Along with the monks, 108 pilgrims from seventeen countries attended—108 being a number of ritual perfection in Indo-Tibetan religions. Mipham's blog reports a schedule of ceremonies, meet-and-greets with himself and his wife, and a sermon from the monastery's abbot, who affirmed that Mipham's leadership challenges were common to great Buddhist teachers. A wide-angle photo shows the middle-aged devotees, many of them white, sitting at attention in the shrine room. Each sports a lapel button emblazoned with what appears to be Mipham's portrait.

After the retreat, which ended March 15, pandemic lockdowns shuttered Shambhala spaces around the world. With retreat and programming income slowed to nearly nil, the San Francisco centre notified members it was on the brink of insolvency, and the larger retreat centres asked members for a bailout. Mipham's summer event in France was postponed, but he kept in touch with devotees by sending out pandemic practice instructions, including advice for devotees to chant the mantra of the Medicine Buddha, often used for healing.

On May 14, a group of the Nepal pilgrims paved the way for Mipham's full return with an open letter reaffirming him as the organization's leader. The writers claimed that "many of the allegations reported about the Sakyong were exaggerated or completely false" but that, "if someone felt hurt or confused by their relationship with him, he has done his best to address their concerns personally." (Julia Howell confirmed that she has not heard from Mipham since the allegations were published.) Mipham's Kalapa Court is wholesome, the letter continued, is responsive to the needs of followers, and remains the centre of the Shambhala universe. "There is no Shambhala without the Sakyong," they wrote.

As of this writing, Mipham seems to be consolidating an inner core of devotees who will remain loyal to him and continue their journey toward his kingdom. And, while the remaining Shambhala administration claims to be working on reform policies, it's not quite clear who will remain to enact them or keep the faith. I made multiple requests to Mipham for comment—directly and through various Shambhala administrators—about the Winn report, the independent investigation, Howell's allegations, and his future teaching intentions. He did not respond.

FOR SURVIVORS of Shambhala, the reckoning continues—and with it, the struggle for recovery. Rachel Bernstein, a Los Angeles psychotherapist who treats ex–cult members, told me that it can be healing to reconnect not only with former members of the same group but also with former members of similar groups, so the person can understand that abuse patterns are standard and predictable. Janja Lalich, an expert on the effects of cults on children, argues that kids who grow up in a group controlled by charismatic leadership have almost no access to outside points of view or ways of being in the world. That's why she encourages ex-members to reestablish secure bonds with family or those who knew them before they entered the group. But, for those born into a cult or recruited through their parents at a young age—as was often the case with Shambhala—this option is rarely open.

For survivors of Shambhala, the reckoning continues—and with it, the struggle for recovery.

John (whose last name is withheld for reasons of family privacy) ran out of options completely. In 1980, at the age of twelve, he left his father and stepmother in Miami to join his mother, Nancy, in Colorado, where, as part of her program in Buddhist psychology at Naropa University, she had to complete a three-month retreat at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. While she was meditating from dawn till dusk, John was in residence. One night, he said, he was woken up by a man—a student in his mother's cohort—assaulting him. John froze and pretended to stay asleep.

"After that first night," John wrote in a statement to the Larimer County police, "he pursued me persistently for many days—at the meditation hall, in the shower room, and in the bathrooms. I was twelve and eventually I gave in." The abuse continued, John remembered, for between three and six months. When he was thirteen, another Dharma Brat became John's girlfriend. (She went on to become Trungpa's sixth "spiritual wife" and later died by suicide at age thirty-four.) When John was fourteen, he wrote, another man at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center—possibly an employee—abused him. Around this time, John first attempted suicide.

John told me his mother had gone to Trungpa and asked him what she should do about her troubled son. According to John, the leader told his mother it needed to be handled by professionals. Then Trungpa told her that she should attend another intensive residential seminary program. At nineteen, John wrote his mother a letter about his sexual abuse. She never answered it, he said. Years later, he found it, opened, in a family photo album. He ripped it up.

The abuse followed John into adulthood. Monique Auffrey was John's partner from 2000 to 2004; they have a daughter together, now eighteen. Auffrey knew John as someone who was both victim and aggressor, who struggled with substance abuse and who used Shambhala psychology to try to persuade her that his domestic violence was acceptable. In 2011, John was charged with uttering death threats against Auffrey and their daughter as they attempted to leave Nova Scotia. "My main memory of him is fear," she said by phone from Calgary, where she's the CEO of a non-profit that provides services to women and children escaping domestic violence.

Auffrey said that, when she was pregnant, John forced her to take Shambhala training. She hadn't been part of the Buddhist group before meeting John. She spoke of a cycle of abuse similar to that described by victims of Trungpa and Mipham—and similar to John's own history as a victim: "He would be violent with me, attack me, insult me, threaten me, and then the response to dealing with that was to meditate and take more Shambhala lessons." Auffrey remembered "There's neither good nor bad" being a consistent mantra in the group. "It always felt like there was no accountability for anything, no matter what it was," she said. "The group's ideology allowed people to get away with rape, with assault, with crimes that the larger population would never put up with."

In our second interview, in May 2019, John described a moment that suggested he had finally abandoned Shambhala teachings. He was driving one day and pulled over when he heard an interview with Leonard Cohen on the CBC. "'These religions that promise you liberation and freedom,'" John recalled Cohen saying, "'that you will be liberated from all of this: it's a cruel promise that won't come true.' "I just burst out crying," John said. "I was just so happy that he said something I was feeling all along. That there was a scam or some kind of package being sold. And he was saying: 'In many cases, you feel things worse, more intensely, more painfully.'" A month after that interview, John died by suicide in his Dartmouth home.

By phone, Auffrey offered a personal assessment of her late partner that seemed to ring true for Trungpa's legacy in general. "If people had rallied together to hold him accountable for his own behaviour," she told me, "there might have been a chance that he could have gotten the help he needed. That's the way I like to look at it—to hope that, with intervention, we can change the course of such a destructive trajectory." It struck me, after we hung up, that her words sounded almost Buddhist in their mindfulness and compassion.

MATTHEW REMSKI

Matthew Remski is a yoga teacher, trainer, and consultant living in Toronto. He writes about adverse experiences in yoga culture at matthewremski.com.

JAMES LEE CHIAHAN

James Lee Chiahan is an artist and graphic designer based in Toronto.



https://thewalrus.ca/survivors-of-an-international-buddhist-cult-share-their-stories/

Pema Chödrön calls out Shambhala leader over sex abuse

Stephanie Domet
January 23, 2020
The Coast Halifax

Pema Chödrön calls out Shambhala leader over sex abuse

Famed Buddhist nun resigns to protest the return of disgraced Osel Mukpo.

One of Shambhala Buddhism's most prominent figures announced she's stepping down as a senior teacher. Pema Chödrön, best-selling author and Buddhist nun, has had a decades-long association with Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton. She sent a letter to the Shambhala board announcing her resignation from her position as an acharya, then shared it more broadly through the Shambhala Times, the Halifax-headquartered Shambhala community's global news site.

"When I read the recent letter from the Sakyong saying that he wished to start teaching again and would do so for all who requested, I was disheartened. I experienced this news as such a disconnect from all that's occurred in the last year and half," Chödrön writes. "It feels unkind, unskillful and unwise for the Sakyong to just go forward as if nothing had happened without relating compassionately to all of those who have been hurt and without doing some deep inner work on himself."

Osel Mukpo, known in Shambhala as Sakyong Mipham, "stepped away" from teaching and administrative duties at Shambhala in February 2019, after some of the allegations of sexual assault and clergy sexual misconduct that were documented in reports from Buddhist Project Sunshine were confirmed by an independent investigation by Halifax law firm Wickwire Holm. Mukpo's return to teaching comes at the request of a small group of students in Europe, and is sanctioned by the Shambhala board.

Chödrön was called out in one Buddhist Project Sunshine report for telling a woman who says she was sexually assaulted that her assault didn't happen and, if it did, "you probably liked it." Chödrön subsequently apologized to the woman.

In her letter, Chödrön urges the board to consult broadly across the Shambhala community for ways to move forward with full accountability for the allegations that Mukpo and other teachers abused students—and that the board knew and did nothing. In response the board issued a statement of its own, noting it intends to meet with her to discuss her ideas. The statement includes this further note from Chödrön:

"I have no intention of leaving the Shambhala community and would always do my best to be there for anyone who might need it. However, if no path forward can be found, that would break my heart, and I'm not sure what I would do."

https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/shambhalas-leader-still-in-denial-about-sex-abuse/Content?oid=23321352

Special Report: Secrets of Shambhala

ChapmanNews
December 13, 2019

"For months, Chapman News has been investigating an interterm travel course at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. Today we bring you a special report that raises questions about student safety."


Producer/Reporter: Olivia Young
Editors: Scott Andrews, Jared Brosnan, Satvi Sunkara & Natalie Rawson
Shooters: Brandon Pike & Satvi Sunkara
Executive Producers: Sam Thomas & Natalie Rawson
Professors: Bret Marcus & Suzanne Lysack

Trustee of UK charity 'covered up abuse' by Buddhist guru

Rigpa Fellowship’s Patrick Gaffney had knowledge of improper acts, watchdog found

Simon Murphy

The Guardian
September 2, 2019

A British charity founded by a disgraced Buddhist guru, who died last week after he was accused of sexual misconduct towards some of his followers, faces further controversy after it emerged that one of its trustees was found responsible for covering up abuse.

Patrick Gaffney was a trustee of the Rigpa Fellowship, which was founded by the Tibetan guru Sogyal Rinpoche, who died aged 72 in Thailand on Wednesday after going into hiding following the claims.

Weeks before Rinpoche’s death, Gaffney – the guru’s right-hand man who co-edited his bestselling The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying – was banned by a watchdog from working with charities for eight years.

The British devotee, 70, who Rinpoche described as “one of my oldest and closest students” after the pair met at Cambridge University in 1970, faced the sanction after an inquiry by the Charity Commission.

According to the Times, the watchdog uncovered evidence that Gaffney had “knowledge of instances and allegations of improper acts and sexual and physical abuse against students”.

Announcing its decision in June, the commission said: “Mr Gaffney failed to take appropriate action in response to this information and is therefore responsible for misconduct and/or mismanagement in the administration of the charity.”

Amy Spiller, the head of the commission’s investigations team, said: “We are continuing to investigate concerns about this charity via our ongoing statutory inquiry. However, the safety and wellbeing of beneficiaries and those that come into contact with the charity must always be a priority for the trustees and staff of a charity. This trustee has been disqualified with immediate effect for failing in his duty to protect those who came into contact with the charity.”

Celebrity readers of Rinpoche’s book included the Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, and the actor John Cleese. The Rigpa Fellowship announced Rinpoche’s death, which came after complications during his cancer treatment, with “deep sadness” on its website.

Rinpoche founded the fellowship, which runs a Buddhist centre in Islington, north London, in 1979. Rinpoche served as the charity’s spiritual director before he “retired” in August 2017 following the allegations. Gaffney was appointed to the charity’s “visionary board” after Rinpoche stood down.

The charity, which runs courses and seminars, has centres around the world including in Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.

An investigation conducted by the legal firm Lewis Silkin, commissioned by the fellowship, concluded last year that “some students of Sogyal Lakar [Rinpoche] … have been subjected to serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse by him”.

It added that “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”.

The fellowship said: “Patrick Gaffney was a trustee of the English charity but resigned last year. We have adopted a new grievance procedure that includes an independent council, who can receive complaints brought by members and the public.”



https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/02/trustee-uk-charity-covered-up-abuse-buddhist-guru-rigpa-fellowship

Buddhist leader facing sexual misconduct allegations is 'embarrassed and thoroughly apologetic'

BRETT BUNDALEThe Star
The Canadian Press
July 10, 2018

HALIFAX—International Buddhist leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is apologizing for the “pain, confusion and anger” sweeping through the Shambhala community amid sexual misconduct allegations against the Nova Scotia-based spiritual leader.

Mipham, who has stepped back from his duties pending the outcome of a third-party investigation, said in a letter Tuesday that he takes responsibility for the pain the Buddhist community is experiencing.

“In a state of complete heartbreak, I write to you, humble, embarrassed, and thoroughly apologetic for disappointing you,” the 55-year-old guru said.

“I am committed to engaging with women and others in our community who have felt marginalized, beginning this week. I will be using this time of self-reflection to deeply listen and to better understand how the dynamics of power, gender and my actions have affected others.”

He added: “I feel tremendous regret and sadness, and I commit myself to continuing this healing.”

Mipham is the head of the religious organization, which is headquartered in Halifax.

Inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, Shambhala is one of the largest western Buddhist movements with more than 200 meditation centres around the world.

The spiritual leader’s apology comes after a former Shambhala community member, Andrea Winn, published a report last month with statements from women alleging sexual misconduct by Mipham.

In the report, multiple unnamed women accuse the him of heavy drinking and using his attendant to “procure women students for his own sexual gratification.”

The women alleged Mipham would identify a woman during a teaching session or other event, and then use his attendant to bring her to his lodgings late at night for sex.

“Women were brought to (Mipham) in the middle of the night and pushed out the door before dawn to stumble back to their beds,” a woman described in a statement included in the report.

The women said they were concerned they would face repercussions if they rejected his advances.

None of the allegations has been proven in court and no charges have been laid.

Members of the Kalapa Council, the Buddhist organization’s governing body, will also be stepping down through a “phased departure.”

The leadership council has hired Halifax law firm Wickwire Holm to investigate the allegations.

Mipham, who is often referred to as the Sakyong, was unavailable for an interview Tuesday.

In his letter, the spiritual leader shares “some of the challenges” he has gone through.

“After the passing of my father, I took on the leadership role of Shambhala at a young age, followed by my enthronement in 1995,” said Mipham, considered royalty within the Shambhala community.

“During this period, I struggled to find my way, and fumbled with unhealthy power dynamics and alcohol. I failed to recognize the pain and confusion I was creating.”

He said a group of senior students expressed concern with his drinking, and he began to realize how his actions were affecting others.

The Shambhala leader says he cut back his drinking, began running, and developed a healthier lifestyle, both physically and spiritually.

In 2005, he met a woman and they later married. They now have three daughters.

“Since then, I have consciously worked on improving my relationship to alcohol as well as trying to improve my general behaviour and my relationship to others as a teacher and as a person,” Mipham said.

The most recent allegation against Mipham detailed in the report is from August 2011.

https://www.thestar.com/halifax/2018/07/10/buddhist-leader-facing-sexual-misconduct-allegations-is-embarrassed-and-thoroughly-apologetic.html

Shambhala Buddhist Leader Faces Sexual Abuse Allegations

Libby Torres
Gothamist
July 12, 2018

The Shambhala Buddhist community in North America is being rocked by allegations of sexual abuse at the highest level, according to multiple reports including the New York Times.

The allegations revolve around the prominent leader and creator of the Shambhala iteration of Buddhism, Mipham Rinpoche. Referred to as Sakyong Mipham— sakyong is a Tibetan word that can be translated as "king"— Rinpoche was the subject of a detailed, incriminating report released on June 28th. The lengthy report was compiled by Andrea Winn, an active member of the Shambhala community since her childhood, who contends that she was sexually abused by "multiple perpetrators" in the Shambhala community as a child—then forced to leave.

Winn had previously filed a report detailing the sexual abuse she and others faced while part of the community, but had not mentioned any direct involvement of Sakyong Mipham until now. In the second report of what Winn is calling "Project Sunshine" (her efforts to bring to light the sexual abuse that's plagued the community for "nearly four decades"), she's compiled statements from various women who allege they were abused by Sakyong Mipham.

One woman describes how she left behind her "secular life" and nearly all friends and family to follow Sakyong Mipham, with whom she had an intense spiritual connection. "Shambhala was my world and the inner mandala was my home," she said in the report. "At the center of all of this was my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche."

According to the woman, she frequently worked as a server in the Sakyong's residence, attending to dinner parties and banquets. She mentions an "experience that occurred repeatedly over the years": after a party or dinner, a drunken Sakyong Mipham would kiss and grope her, later "aggressively encouraging me to come to bed with him," the woman claims. Not wishing to provoke the ire of the other female guests whom the Sakyong was also pursuing, she declined most times this occurred. However, she did sleep in the Sakyong's bed one time; he was so drunk, she explains, she spent "much of the night" holding a bowl for him to vomit in. She managed to sneak out of the room, and says "there was never any mention of these encounters." The woman alleges that the Sakyong would regularly seek out women to bed, then quickly lose interest and replace them with a new woman.

When she spoke up about her experiences with the Sakyong, the woman was slowly exiled from the Shambhala community, effectively losing all friends and connections therein.

Another erstwhile devotee shared her harrowing testimony in the report as well. This second unnamed woman claims she was invited to the Sakyong's residence late one night, where he greeted her wearing nothing but a robe. He allegedly led the woman into his bedroom, where he began kissing her and removing her clothes. "I said that I couldn't have sex with him," she said in her statement. "[The Sakyong] seemed stunned. He thought for a while and then pushed my face down towards his penis and said 'Well you might as well finish this.'"

"I was so embarrassed and horrified I did it," the woman explains. On a separate occasion, she was invited to a dinner party at the Sakyong's residence, "where the Sakyong was encouraging everyone to drink a lot," she says. After insisting that everyone take off their clothes, the Sakyong allegedly led one woman into a room while the rest of the party continued. One of the Sakyong's associates led the unnamed woman from the report into the Sakyong's bedroom, where she discovered the Sakyong having sex with the woman from earlier. "He said to me, 'She won't come. Do something to help,'" her testimony reads. "I stood there stunned and he said, 'Play with her tits. Do something.'"

A few days before the report was officially released, the Sakyong issued a public statement of his own, in which he acknowledged that he engaged in "relationships" with women from the community, some of whom "have shared experiences of feeling harmed as a result of these relationships." The Sakyong emphasized that he was "committed to healing these wounds" and would be "entering a period of self-reflection and listening." He later stepped down, the Times reports.

The governing council of Shambhala International (based in Nova Scotia, Halifax) also announced they would be resigning.

This is not the first time the Shambhala Buddhist community—which has locations across the world, including one in New York—has faced allegations of abuse. In the 1980s, reports that a high-ranking Shambhala leader knowingly infected sexual partners with HIV rocked the community.

Despite the disturbing nature of these claims, both Winn and the governing council (who will slowly be phased out of leadership roles, the Times says) are now focusing on "beginning a healing process for our community."

http://gothamist.com/2018/07/12/high_ranking_shambhala_buddhist_off.php

The 'King' of Shambhala Buddhism Is Undone by Abuse Report

Andy Newman
New York Times
July 11, 2018

In a shrine on the sixth floor of a Manhattan office building, a photo of a man in golden robes hangs above an altar. Another photo of him sits upon a throne.

He is the head of one of the largest Buddhist organizations in the West, Shambhala International, a network of more than 200 outposts in over 30 countries where thousands come for training in meditation and mindfulness and some delve into deeper mysteries.

The man is Mipham Rinpoche. He is known as the Sakyong, a Tibetan word that translates roughly as king, and his students take vows to follow him that are binding across lifetimes. These days, they are feeling sad, confused, angry and betrayed.

Late last month, a former Shambhala teacher released a report alleging that the Sakyong had sexually abused and exploited some of his most devoted female followers for years. Women quoted in the report wrote of drunken groping and forcefully extracted sexual favors. The report said that senior leaders at Shambhala — an organization whose motto is “Making Enlightened Society Possible” — knew of the Sakyong’s misconduct and covered it up.

The Sakyong apologized a few days before the report was formally released, admitting to “relationships” with women in the community, some of whom “shared experiences of feeling harmed as a result.” Followers and Shambhala groups around the world demanded more action.

On Friday, it came: The governing council of Shambhala International, which is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, resigned en masse, “in the interest of beginning a healing process for our community.”

That night, the Sakyong, 55, took leave from running Shambhala as an outside firm investigates abuse allegations against him and other Shambhala teachers. He would, the announcement stated, “enter a period of self-reflection.”

The Sakyong is not only another executive or religious leader dethroned by #MeToo, but the sole holder of the most sacred teachings in a custody chain that goes back centuries, the only one who can transmit them, according to the traditions of his lineage.

A few days before the Sakyong stepped aside, Ramoes Gaston, a volunteer at the Manhattan center, on West 22nd Street, who has studied Shambhala for eight years, said the revelations had ripped his world apart.

“I don’t want it to be exposed,” Mr. Gaston said. “But it has to be exposed.”

The downfall of a Buddhist leader in the West accused of sexual impropriety has become its own sorry tradition. Last year, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, who founded a monastery in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., retired after allegations of sexual misconduct. So did Sogyal Rinpoche, author of “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” who was accused of decades of sexual assaults and violent rage. In the Zen tradition, fallen masters include Joshu Sasaki and Eido Shimano, two of the leading proponents of Zen in America.

In Shambhala, bad behavior runs in the bloodline. The organization was founded by the Sakyong’s Tibet-born father, Chögyam Trungpa, a wildly charismatic man, brilliant teacher and embodiment of the concept known as “crazy wisdom” whose alcoholic exploits and womanizing were well known. He died in 1987. In between Chögyam Trungpa and the Sakyong, Shambhala was led by an American-born Buddhist who is mainly remembered for having sex with students even after he knew that he had AIDS.

The hyperconcentration of authority in the most revered teachers of Tibetan Buddhism lends itself to abuse, said Lama Tsultrim Allione, one of the first American women to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist nun and a former member of Chögyam Trungpa’s group who knew the Sakyong when he was a child.

“One is told that one must see the lama as the Buddha and that anything the lama does is perfect and that whatever might seem wrong with it, that is your impure vision. This can be a transformative practice, but only when the lama is truly awake,” said Lama Tsultrim, who leads a Buddhist center in Colorado and just published a book, “Wisdom Rising: Journey Into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine.”

In Shambhala, Lama Tsultrim said, “the level of institutionalized hierarchy is quite extraordinary,” with the Sakyong functioning “sort of like a divine king.” His inner circle, with its ministers and attendants, is called the “court.” He has a personal flag that local centers can buy for $350, to fly when he visits.

The woman behind the exposé, Andrea Winn, grew up in the Shambhala community in Halifax and says that she and many other children were sexually abused by adults in the community.

In early 2017 — months before #MeToo became a cultural phenomenon — she began a yearlong effort, “Project Sunshine,” to gather accounts by survivors of the abuse. The resulting report, published in February, prompted Shambhala International to announce “an effort to address issues of past harm in our community.”

The Sakyong praised survivors for “bravery and courage” in speaking out, without mentioning any misconduct of his own. But the report also prompted women who said they had been abused by the Sakyong to come forward, providing material for the second report, released June 28.

One woman wrote that for years, before he was married, the Sakyong would kiss and grope her when he got drunk. Like many women around the Sakyong, she desperately hoped to become his wife, she wrote, and she rationalized his boorishness by telling herself that the Sakyong was trying to show her “the patterns of my own poverty mentality and grasping.”

Another woman wrote that the Sakyong summoned her one night and when she refused to have sex with him, he pushed her face toward his penis and said, “You might as well finish this.” She wrote, “I was so embarrassed and horrified I did it.” A third woman wrote that the Sakyong groped her in 2011, after his daughter’s first birthday party.

Yet another woman came forward on Tuesday and said that at a dinner in Chile in 2002, a drunken Sakyong pulled her into the bathroom and locked and blocked the door.

“He started to grope me and try to undress me,” the woman said by phone, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I was like ‘No, no, I have a boyfriend.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’” She said the Sakyong grabbed her hand and put it on his penis through his robe before she escaped.

With the exception of the 2011 episode, the allegations against the Sakyong date from before 2006. They were vetted by a retired employment lawyer, Carol Merchasin, who contacted Ms. Winn after the first report was released. Ms. Merchasin said she found all the accounts to be credible.

The Sakyong would not comment on the accounts “out of respect for the integrity of the independent investigation,” said his lawyer, Michael Scott.

Ms. Winn, 50, a leadership coach based in Halifax, said of the council’s resignation and the Sakyong’s stepping aside: “It came as a surprise, and as a huge relief. Now I feel that there’s this possibility for healing.”

Local centers are dealing with the fallout in their own ways. At a center in New Haven, the Sakyong’s photo has been taken down.

At a meeting at the New York center last week, several people who had found refuge in Shambhala from their own histories of addiction and sexual abuse said they no longer felt safe, and a teacher, Kevin Bogle, resigned in protest.

“I have been livid this entire week from the news that has been reported and the harm that has been committed,” he told the gathering.

Many of the Sakyong’s followers are praying for him. Mr. Gaston of the New York center said that when he sees the Sakyong’s photo above the altar, he thinks about the pain the Sakyong must have been in that would have led him to cause such harm to others. “With every breath I exhale,” he said, “I hope that some of my mercy is communicated to him.”

Follow Andy Newman on Twitter: @andylocal

Aaron Robertson contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Women Allege Abuse, and a Buddhist ‘King’ Falls.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/shambhala-sexual-misconduct.html