The Problem with Pema Chödrön - by Matthew Remski

 https://matthewremski.medium.com/the-problem-with-pema-ch%C3%B6dr%C3%B6n-25c35ed4a8e7

The Problem with Pema Chödrön

“Leaning in” to vulnerability, or coping with abuse?

Matthew Remski

Matthew Remski

Investigative journo: conspirituality & cults. Co-host at http://conspirituality.net. Bylines: GEN, The Walrus. More @ http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/

In the alternative spirituality universe, few figures exude emotional gravitas like Pema Chödrön. Whether from her rugged retreat centre in Cape Breton, or from the solarium of Oprah’s Montecito mansion, Chödrön preaches a message of receptivity, acceptance, and the need to recognize melancholy as a gateway to empathy.

Chödrön’s many faces — tender grandmother and austere nun, feelings counsellor and religious disciplinarian— transcend the airbrushed world of Instagram self help. Her origin story and winding biography embody a message that rebels against a superficial age. She asserts that fulfillment and wisdom, if not happiness, are won through loss, disillusionment, and facing despair with an exposed heart. Chödrön has fermented an adulting tonic for American childishness.

She is faithful to the venerable Tibetan formula of renouncing worldly desires, developing limitless compassion, and using meditation to collapse the space between self and other. The message seems to be as Buddhist as her maroon robes.

But because Chödrön is also the messenger for her guru, Chögyam Trungpa, one of the most troubled and abusive Buddhist figures of the 20th century, it might be time to re-evaluate her legacy. It might be time to reckon with the possibility that her religion evolved in part as a way of finding peace in the shadow of a spiritual monster, and within a fringe church, Shambhala International, that has been by turns aspirational, evangelical, claustrophobic, chaotic, and cultic.

Chödrön’s catalogue has inspired millions, but it has also served to launder the Shambhala legacy and lend bourgeois respectability to Trungpa’s “crazy wisdom” movement. And what if, in its uncritical presentation of her roots, it also trojan-horses a reactionary attitude of abuse tolerance into the mainly-female self-help market?

When Chögyam Trungpa died of terminal alcoholism in 1984 at the age of 47, he left behind a teetering pyramid of lieutenants intoxicated by his grandiosity, and a silenced network of students who had survived his sexual and emotional abuse. His successor, Tom Rich, infected an unknown number of students with HIV/AIDS, believing that his devotion to Trungpa would act as a spiritual condom. The organization was shaken when one of Rich’s rape victims died. Trungpa’s son, Mipham Mukpo, who assumed the organizational reins of Shambhala in 1995, took after his father in many ways, except in the genius department. In 2019, an internal investigation, prompted by the guerilla journalism of the group’s survivors, found that Mukpo had also assaulted students over years. (Here’s a thorough timeline.)

What role, if any, did Chödrön play in this abuse history? How much did she bystand in relation her beloved teacher’s chaos and perversion? She hasn’t said in any detail, but a photograph and two interviews provide context.

Here’s a snap from the early 1980s showing the “marriage” of Trungpa to one of his seven “spiritual wives”. Chödrön watches over, the lone clerical presence in the room.

What was it like to be one of Trungpa’s “spiritual wives”? Of the five who survive — one of the women, who he “married” when she was 18, died of suicide at the age of 34 — only one has spoken out. Leslie Hays describes persistent sexual violence, being responsible for supplying the master with cocaine that was said to be mystical medicine, and watching him torture a cat. Some of his top students bent over backwards to frame such behaviours as spiritual teachings, or divine jokes.

Chödrön may have had little idea of what was really going on, but Trungpa’s behaviour was enough of an open secret that an interviewer for Tricycle, a top Buddhist publication, was compelled to ask her about it, in modest terms, in 1993.

Tricycle: Would you say that the intention behind this unconventional behavior, including his sexual exploits and his drinking, was to help others?

Pema Chödrön: As the years went on, I felt everything he did was to help others. But I would also say now that maybe my understanding has gone even deeper, and it feels more to the point to say I don’t know. I don’t know what he was doing. I know he changed my life. I know I love him. But I don’t know who he was. And maybe he wasn’t doing things to help everyone, but he sure helped me. I learned something from him. But who was that masked man?

Tricycle: In recent years women have become more articulate about sexism. And we know more today about the prevalence of child abuse and about how many people come into dharma really hurting. If you knew ten years ago what you know today, would you have been so optimistic about Trungpa Rinpoche and his sexuality? Would you have wanted some of the women you’ve been working with to study with him, given their histories of sexual abuse?

Pema Chödrön: I would have said, You know he loves women, he’s very passionate, and has a lot of relationships with women, and that might be part of it if you get involved with him, and you should read all his books, go to all his talks, and actually see if you can get close to him. And you should do that knowing you might get an invitation to sleep with him, so don’t be naive about that, and don’t think you have to do it, or don’t have to do it. But you have to decide for yourself who you think this guy is.

Tricycle: Were there women who turned down his sexual invitations and maintained close relationships as students? Was that an option?

Pema Chödrön: Yes. Definitely. The other students were often the ones who made people feel like they were square and uptight if they didn’t want to sleep with Rinpoche, but Rinpoche’s teaching was to throw out the party line. However, we’re always up against human nature. The teacher says something, then everybody does it. There was a time when he smoked cigarettes and everybody started smoking. Then he stopped and they stopped and it was ridiculous. But we’re just people with human habitual patterns, and you can count on the fact that the students are going to make everything into a party line, and we did. The one predictable thing about him was that he would continually pull the rug out no matter what. That’s how he was.

Here, Chödrön privileges the supposed genius of an abuser over the time, agency, and self-direction of his prospective female student, who is supposed to “decide for yourself who you think this guy is”. They are supposed to invest time and emotional labour in Trungpa before understanding his true nature — even after Chödrön describes how he abuses power.

Chödrön’s statement manages to both hide and spiritualize an induction into what researcher Alexandra Stein calls the trauma bonds of cultic groups, in which the leader is simultaneously the source of love and danger for the follower.

Trungpa was brilliant, Chödrön suggests, because “he would continually pull the rug out no matter what.” She makes it sound as if this were a sign of care, and that any earnest follower should be thankful for being upended.

In her riveting addition to cult analysis literature, Stein argues that the primary task that a high-demand group must accomplish in relation to recruits is to take their existing attachment patterning — instilled through familial and intimate conditioning — and, through an unpredictable alternation of love and fear, convert it into a “disorganized” state. There’s a huge literature on this; I’ll let Stein summarize the basics here:

[Disorganized attachment] responses occur when a child has been in a situation of fright without solution. Their caregiver is at once the safe haven and also the source of threat or alarm. So, when the child feels threatened by the caregiver, he or she is caught in an impossible situation: both comfort and threat are represented by the same person –the caregiver. The child experiences the unresolvable paradox of seeking to simultaneously flee from and approach the caregiver. This happens at a biological level, not thought out or conscious, but as evolved behavior to fear. The child attempts to run TO and flee FROM the caregiver at one and the same time… However, in most cases the need for proximity — for physical closeness — tends to override attempts to avoid the fear-arousing caregiver. So usually the child stays close to the frightening parent while internally both their withdrawal and approach systems are simultaneously activated, and in conflict. — Stein, loc 894–903

Chödrön’s life-long message, inspired by and inspiring Shambhala’s content generally, is about finding rest and space and security “When Things Fall Apart”, as her 1996 best-selling book’s title alludes. It’s now worth asking whether this message has as much to do with Buddhism as it does with creating a poetic strategy for metabolizing and normalizing disorganized and abusive relationships that presented themselves as loving.

The valuing of Trungpa’s interpersonal chaos as a spiritual teaching resonates with Chödrön’s own coming-to-Buddha moment. As she explained to Oprah, her spiritual path began the moment her second husband abruptly announced he was having an affair and wanted a divorce.

“It was so shocking, so traumatizing I suppose,” she tells Oprah, “that I had that experience that I describe: it was this moment of total internal silence.”

As a former Buddhist myself, I can decode the phrase “that experience” in Chödrön’s story as a reference to the mystical moment of “samadhi”, in which life and thought and self-perception seem to stand still, while a window opens on a serene layer of existence, where the wise person can abide in equanimity.

“I had to learn something about being in that space,” she says. “No ground at all. Groundless.” Here she echos one of the most iconic slogans of Trungpa’s brand: that maturity means living with grace amidst “groundlessness”: a kind of precarious but possibly creative uncertainty. What Chödrön doesn’t tell Oprah, or the world, is that Trungpa’s behaviours created precarious uncertainty for everyone around him, often with tragic results.

Chödrön’s epiphany is hers and hers alone, and I don’t want to degrade the wisdom she found in it. What’s important about this moment with Oprah is that it turns interpersonal trauma and spiritual revelation into the lock-and-key of Chödrön’s Buddhist franchise. It also presents the moment of deep psychological shock, and the derealized and disembodied feelings that can accompany it, as signs of grace.

But the tough-love scene can have a cruel edge. In 2018, a woman came forward to describe going to Chödrön to disclose that the manager of a retreat centre had raped her. After telling the woman she didn’t believe the story, Chödrön also reportedly said, “If it’s true I suspect that you were into it.” Chödrön issued an open apology for the incident after it was revealed.

In the 2011 hagiographical film “Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche”, director and Trungpa student Johanna Demetrakas records Chödrön adding nuance to her 1993 interview. The context for the quote is a waffling discussion of Trungpa’s alcoholism, and whether it harmed his students. (I can say from years of reporting on the community, in which alcohol abuse is a chronic community health issue, that it absolutely did.)

People say to me, how could you follow a teacher like that? Or how could an enlightened person do that? I do not know. I can’t buy a party line where they say it was sacred activity or something like this. Come up with ground to make it okay. I also can’t come up with ground or a fixed idea to make it not okay. You know, I’m left, really left in that I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can’t answer the relative questions because he defied being able to answer them.

That last sentence is very strange:

But I can’t answer the relative questions because he defied being able to answer them.

The word “relative” here indicates “mundane” reality in Buddhist philosophy, often said to be obscuring “ultimate” reality. But who is not answering which questions? The grammatical muddiness seems to elide subject (Chödrön) into object (Trungpa). Her inability to answer a basic conduct question is a reflection of his own mystique. This makes sense within the tradition of guru devotion to which Chödrön is committed, where students are asked to merge themselves with their teachers. If Chödrön received certain levels of teaching and initiation from Trungpa, she would also be bound by Tibetan tradition to never speak ill of him.

Chödrön’s “I don’t know”, spoken through a serene gaze, is central to her brand. She has a powerful ability to poetically mobilize personal vulnerability to reinforce a doctrinal belief not just in the unknowability of “relative” answers — such as whether a figure in power is abusive or not— but in their irrelevance.

The “don’t-know” attitude lauded in contemporary Buddhist and mindfulness discourse might serve to deescalate internal tensions ratcheted up by false assumptions and petty judgements. But it could also defang a crucial contention of #metoo feminism: that everyone, especially women, absolutely knows what’s happening behind the facades of power.

It’s important to note that Chödrön’s message vibrates loudly for those managing the fallout from their own institutional abuse crises. In an article pondering the competing stories of love and terror that constitute the abusive legacy of Pattabhi Jois, Ashtanga Yoga teacher Kino MacGregor recommended Chödrön’s Tricycle interview to her million-plus followers as a resource that would help them navigate “the complex process around working through a Guru’s troubling behavior.” According to one survivor’s estimate, Jois, MacGregor’s teacher, committed over 30,000 acts of sexual assault in his teaching career, under the guise of “adjustments”.

As 2020 began, Mipham Mukpo announced he was considering coming back to teach, despite the investigation that found he had assaulted students. The Shambhala Board of Directors indicated they would welcome him. Soon after, Pema Chödrön resigned her position from the group’s leadership. Her resignation letter reads like a shift from “when things fall apart” to “when we have no choice but to leave”.

“The seemingly very clear message that we are returning to business as usual distresses me deeply,” she wrote. “How can we return to business as usual when there is no path forward for the vast majority of the community who are devoted to the vision of Shambhala and are yearning for accountability, a fresh start, and some guidance on how to proceed?”

As the pandemic erupted last spring, Chödrön visited Oprah again, this time in her wildflower garden in Maui, to promote her new book, Welcoming the Unwelcome. After a discussion that expanded on classic themes — the first chapter is “Begin with a Broken Heart” — Oprah turned the conversation over to the crisis surrounding Mipham Mukpo.

“I was angry at him,” Chodron said, recalling hearing about the accusations against Mukpo. “I felt saddened for him.” She reprised her phrase from 1993: “It was a rug-pulling-out experience.”

Oprah mentioned other abusers within Shambhala, without naming Trungpa.

“The situation is horrendous,” Chodron said. “My future is totally up in the air. I’m too old to actually worry about it too much.”

Oprah pivoted to the reports of Chödrön having first dismissed, but then apologizing to the rape victim who came to her for support. She asked Chödrön what she had learned.

At first, Chödrön used Buddhist terminology to worry that the #metoo movement was demonizing people, and how it might benefit from philosophies of change and forgiveness. But as Oprah pressed her, she expressed regret again for her lapse in compassion, and wondered aloud whether she had ignored or dismissed other women in her role over the years.

“My intention is always to help,” Chödrön said, “and not to hurt somebody.”