Related Sidebar: Sex in the Forbidden Zone by Katy Butler
Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, informally surveyed 54 Buddhist, Hindu and lay teachers in the United States as well as their students. In a 1985 Yoga Journal article, “Sex Lives of the Gurus,” he reported that 15 of 54 were celibate. Thirty-four of the remaining 39 - including Tibetan lamas, Zen roshis, vipassana meditation teachers and Indian swamis - had had sexual relationships with their students, ranging from one-night stands to committed relationships ending in marriage. Half of the students told Kornfield that the relationships “undermined their practice, their relationship with their teacher, and their feelings of self-worth,” he wrote.
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“I’d never really felt intimate, never really felt known before,” she told me recently. “Until he began to relate sexually to me, he had been the most important man I’d ever met, a wonderful teacher. He touched my deepest primal self, and I felt the promise of a spiritual intimacy that I longed for with my whole being. I very much hoped that by breaking through to that forbidden area I would somehow, magically, break through to all that was held frozen and paralyzed within me.”
For six years, my friend remained enmeshed in this secret sexual relationship. It healed none of her old wounds; in fact it created new ones. She became a priest, but at the same time, she was guilt-ridden, isolated by secrecy from the rest of the community, and yet unable to pull away. Even after ending the relationship, she guarded its secret for years. She ultimately gave up her priest’s robes, left the community and entered therapy to repair the damage.
“As soon as we became sexually involved, any possibility of real spiritual intimacy with him ended,” she told me recently. “And so did my trust of my own inner center. It felt like incest to me–it was very physically unrewarding, and after every time, I would feel just destroyed.”
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