Why Gurus Break Bad (and a path to becoming a spiritual teacher who doesn’t)
What causes so many spiritual teachers to abuse their pupils—and can we transcend the problem with a Digital Age disruption of embodied wisdom nested within peer-to-peer networks?
N.B. There are topics within this piece that have many detailed discernments that this short-form medium does not afford the space to go into (I do in other pieces and books). I am mildly dyslexic, work out big ideas, and heal my wounds, through writing — so please expect, and excuse, typos and errors.
Sex, Love & Rock Star Cults
The head of the largest Tibetan Buddhist community groomed students to have sex and knowingly spread AIDS to others. His master, the legendary teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, knew about this—and did nothing. Soygal Rinpoche, who leads a network of 100 Buddhist retreat centers, punched a nun in the stomach for having his step up to his throne in the wrong place, has “ ‘left monks, nuns, and lay people… with bloody injuries and permanent scars”, and, where that not enough, has been accused of multiple acts of sexual assault.
Luminaries of the New Age scene like Marc Gafni and Andrew Cohen have been accused of all kinds of mental, physical, and financial abuse. Over 200 former students of Cohen’s signed an online petition to stop him teaching again even after he took many years off to reflect; and then apologized for his errors publicly. They didn’t believe that he really owned is own doo doo. Even old-timer Osho, was apparently addicted to valium, allowed heavily-armed acolytes to prowl the retreat center, and may have sanctioned the poisoning of hundreds of people in a restaurant.
In the last 24 months, the head of the wildly successful New Tantra organization was recently outed as a serial abuser of pretty much every kind. A big guru in Thailand has been forced to close down his center after many claims of assault and rape. The leaders of a hip personal development organization in New York have been indicted for sex trafficking.
Tragically the list goes on and on.
As someone who spends a great deal of his time teaching wisdom about our true nature— and sharing transformational tools to help people heal and live a life of service — with fragile and vulnerable people (because we all are fragile and vulnerable), these revelations hit me hard.
In fact, after watching the Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country, it took me a week of heavy-duty inner work to process my feelings of sadness and, in truth, horror at my own career “choice”. Was this purpose pathway walkable without sinking into abuses of power over students?
WTF?
Power & Protection vs. Love & Connection
I am clear that most wisdom teachers come to the work because of their own pain and suffering. It’s what happened to the historical Buddha. Wisdom helps wounds become embodied wisdom teachings.
Most of my fellow teachers will happily say this healing process was part of their journey. I can definitely say that I found the truth and experience of enlightenment to be the only thing big enough to help me handle the pain of my abused, bullied, and neurotic (former-ish) self. Most, if not all teachers, have wounds within.
When one realizes that the process of switching on /waking up changes everything, and one groks that until others get this they will always suffer, a lifelong commitment to spreading this realization seems the only sensible choice. I understand the fervent, all-encompassing evangelism for sharing spiritual enlightenment with the entire world.
However, as I detail in my books, any purposeful mission can always be hijacked by what we call The Protector within, and its drive to survive life through control and defense. The Protector is not wrong or bad; far from it. It has a sacred and evolutionarily elemental job to keep us alive.
But to do this, it uses old patterns — feelings, beliefs, and habits that once worked to keep us safe but are now probably maladapted— to do its job. This is where most self-sabotage and almost “evil” behavior stems: the repetition of defensive moves to control the crazy and protect us when they are not a fit for the moment.
Anyone who has established protective patterns to get by life that include say: being rude or mean-spirited; being desirous of being sexually desired; becoming over-confident when anxious to the point of arrogance; wanting to be safe in life with a pot of cash; wanting to be seen, heard, and respected as brilliant— so that means pretty much everyone — will always be at risk of being triggered into such patterns. This is biology.
This means most people who become wisdom teachers are at the constant risk of being profoundly inappropriate, sexually tacky, power-crazed, and financially duplicitous. It goes with being human.
Thus, becoming a teacher of the necessity of quiotidian ethics and discipline as much as mystery and meditation—which is essential in this age of instant download entitlement—can be hijacked by the Protector and become abuse. Teaching about how important it is to find a community that supports our growth, rather than hold us in our old patterns, can become cultic advice to split from our family.
Open-hearted requests for donations to our purpose-projects, so we can pay the bills, can become requests to sign over life savings. Insights into how to be free of sexual hangups, to enjoy the natural and gorgeous embodied experience of intimate love, can easily become a drug-fuelled sex orgy. Well, apparently.
If a spiritual group hierarchical, with rules that must be taken uncritically (rather than principles to be interpreted anew by each person as they live them)—and if people in that community assume or are assigned roles with graded levels of power, whether those with the true teachings, there from the start, who sign the checks, or have the trust of the guru—it generates a space where abuse can thrive.
As Ram Dass said, his life was been a constant dialogue between power and love. Without deep grounding, and non-hierarchical holding, power triumphs over trumps love. Our biology favors definite protection (safety) over the possibility of connection (spirit). Power to heal and liberate can be as intoxicating as power to imprison, tax, or regulate others. It must be consciously seen as such.
Power Becomes A Patriarchal Drip
When charismatic spiritual power meets everyday folk who project their neurotic need for a savior/divinity/master onto a teacher, power can reshape the teacher and disconnect them from the flow of humanity.
Lost along with the humility and modesty is the empathy and compassion that runs in rivulets through their bodies when we are, to quote Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali, one drop that lives and dies in the river.
Many societies have long been trapped in the Master-Slave dialectic. Even if we think we are liberated and emancipated, the social conditioning of expecting a father-figure to save us, to guide us, to provide us with the answer… can be hard to be free from.
If we are so used to looking upwards for the answers, as society teaches us to do, we can willingly sign up for what a friend of mine has called the “Patriarchal Drip”. This then ‘encourages’ the teacher to assume what Nietzsche called Master Morality: where they become seduced and traduced by power and pride.
This is why I think there is a correlation between how distant, unapproachable, and mysterious a teacher appears or conjures themselves to be… and how many followers they have.
It is as if we can’t help but fall back into the protective patterning of waiting for the patriarchal power source to drip-feed us nuggets of wisdom, where we have to stay in the group for years as we don’t want to miss out on the deepest truths—rather than teach, empower, coach, support and then kick us out.
As I know from many years teaching, many workshop participants actively want us to become their guru. This has been a doozie because I have discovered that one does indeed have to step into a position of power (power to, not power over) to have any impact at all from a stage or in a teaching/coaching relationship.
We need to use what (post)Freudians call “transference” to do, and amplify, the transformational work. Traditionally, a therapist helps clients heal ruptures in their own relational fields by playing the role, even if briefly and subtly, of someone the patient has “baggage” with.
Professional therapists have “supervision” — checking in with a senior therapist once a week — to stop the therapist acting out their own “counter-transference”: falling love with/fucking/abusing their clients. But most/many wisdom teachers/healers do not.
This can be very confusing if the therapist/coach/healer. All teachers need to harness a bit of power—that comes from being a role model or goal model of some kind—to create the conditions for others to find their own way to enlightenment and peace. But it is easy to start believing that we are the one’s doing the healing or doing the awakening (e.g. shaktipat).
Neuroses, Personality Disorders & Trauma
On reflection, in many ways I have been lucky because my journey into this work came through crushing shyness and lack of confidence. My big wound was neurosis: not loving myself enough and caring too much about other people liking/loving me.
With neuroses, the Protector turns inward with anger and self-blame. Trauma drove these neuroses to attack myself for decades—even resulting in a full-system post-traumatic and post-viral disease of self-attack: fibromyalgia.
Bullied and excluded, it took me years to think I could teach anything, let alone life-changing wisdom and critical insights on transformation. Plus, being a Brit, I was always profoundly cynical of the New Age scene and the gurus that haunt it. Trained in science and philosophy at Cambridge Uni, I liked to call bullshit on anyone who said that they had “the answer” and/or spewed out mystical half-truths and conspiracy theories.
I still do. That includes teasing myself for being any kind of non-guru. Clearly, my path to teaching wisdom required me to heal this wounding enough to get on stage and share my heart out. Yet a part of me still can’t believe the balls I have on me to go out there and do it. I am daily checking myself before I wreck myself. And if I don’t, my fam will happily do it for me.
In fact, as a consequence of my upbringing, nationality, education, and patterning, I have found it really challenging to step into any form of teacher role. I’m allergic to it. Book publishers, TV execs, and podcast interviewers have expected me to: it’s what sells books and gets people to watch TV. In communities conditioned by the Master-Slave dialectic, experts/gurus/philosophers win.
But I have constantly told them I won’t do it. Yet there are still many readers/students/seekers out there who don’t like to the idea that their enlightenment and transformation will probably take years of hard inner work and not days; that crystals and unicorns aren’t (necessarily) a one-stop-shop to awakening; and that teachers may have a map and method but they don't have the answers for them. Everyone has to live the questions themselves.
Whilst neuroses “create problems for no-one but their owners”, there is another class of psychological challenges, called “personality disorders”, which create problems for everyone but their owners (at least on the surface).
Without being a psychiatrist of any kind (although I did complete many years of medical school), I have a wild conjecture that many gurus have tricksy and undiagnosed personality disorders. Such disorders (like borderline and narcissistic) are hard to spot at first—and most of us don’t really know what they are or what to look for.
People with personality disorders can seem the real deal: they can be massively charismatic, intoxicatingly intense, and eloquent with their spiritual insights. So it is easy to get hooked into their charisma. However, people with personality disorders are often utterly unable to see, let alone own, their own patterning—or hear the feedback of others as anything other than unenlightened gumpf.
They may claim that any push back on their protective patterns, abusive or neglectful, is because the person feeding back is spiritually less mature than they are; doesn’t get the “truth” of non-duality, or is still conditioned by societal morality.
As psychologist Dr John Reid says: people with such disorders “provide justification for refusing to accept blame or responsibility for their actions, and will almost certainly refuse help.” They do not believe they have any shadow (if they ever did). Their Protectors are wisdom talking — but cannot listen to anyone’s feedback on their blindspots around wisdom walking.
The system as a whole then becomes perturbed away from mutual thriving and towards mutual suffering. Such disorders, presumably caused at root by destabilizing trauma, sucks everyone in their orbit into the dynamic like a vortex. It magnifies the force and seduction of the Patriarchal Drip.
Otherwise smart and sensible people get caught in the tractor beam of charismatic power, becoming acolytes who enact their own often neurotic protective patterning to “enable” the gurus.
Personality Disorder patterns can easily hook in the neurotic patterning of clients and exploit them, like malware in a silicon circuit. This is because the neurotic always thinking “it’s me, not them!. It must be me who is still unwise and unenlightened because my teacher is… my teacher”.
You can see this dynamic dissected in the documentaries about Keith Rainier and his NXIVM group—showing how the successful and wealthy got caught in the charisma and ended up becoming abusers (and sex traffickers) too.
“When our teacher kept us waiting, failed to meditate, and was extravagant with money, we ignored it or explained it away as a teaching. A cadre of well-organized subordinates picked up the pieces… This “enabling,” as alcoholism counselors call it, allowed damaging behavior to continue and grow. It insulated our teacher from the consequences of his actions and deprived him of the chance to learn from his mistakes. The process damaged us as well: we habitually denied what was in front of our faces, felt powerless, and lost touch with our inner experience.” Katy Butler, 1990
Trauma & PsychoSpiritual Heart Healing
Most, if not all, protective patterns are anchored into our bodies and minds by unresolved, unacknowledged, and unhealed trauma (emotional pain, wounding, fear memories etc.) When we ourselves are hurt, it is inevitable we will hurt others, even if we start out helping them.
In my view, a true wisdom teacher—and embodied wisdom teacher—must have a sufficiently healed heart, from years of deep and committed inner work, to have anything worth teaching in the first place.
This means not just doing spiritual practice, teaching non-duality, or helping people bliss out in the oneness (whether with aya or dance, meditation or toad venom) but integrating that experience into everyday life with the rigorous transformation of gnarly psychological trauma… ours first of all.
Noone is ever fully healed I imagine. But the process of constant healing helps us become ever-more whole, which helps our teaching bring others in wholeness, through transforming trauma into embodied wisdom.
Only if we commit to the psychological as much as spiritual work can we dissolve our edgy protective patterning and open up space for “repatterns” that enable us to become who we were always meant to be: purpose-driven leaders/entrepreneurs/wisdom teachers/healers etc.
I have observed that many gurus who have grown up in monastic communities, or been supported by large hierarchical and patriarchal organizations, may not have not love, lost, and loved again in the grand school of life—so they are unlikely to have done much of this proper psychological trauma-healing and integration.
Maybe they haven’t had to return, chomping humble pie, to a lover to apologize after a major slip. They probably haven’t had to pick themselves up after being sacked, or going bankrupt, and start over having fully learned from the fail. They may not have turned to their parents, time and time again, to rebuild connection after years of family pain. They are unlikely to have been awake all night attempting to process their upset with their kids.
Perhaps it’s no accident then, that so many other-worldly monks and gurus have been caught doing such sordid this-worldly acts with their students. Their patterning has not been burnished in the fire of everyday disappointments. It’s a recipe for disaster.
As journalist and Buddhist Katy Butler puts it in Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America, this stuff happens in part because of “[a]n unhealthy marriage of Asian hierarchy and American license that distorts the teacher-disciple relationship.”
Old-world, positively medieval, hierarchies are so embedded in both West and East and they lock us into permanent disempowerment and diminishment. No genuine teacher of wisdom, who has embodied that wisdom as love glowing in their hearts and guts, can believe in a dominative hierarchy instead of a generative one.
Generative hierarchies use power for the liberation of all, emanating from hearts that are purified in compassion, gratitude, and humility. Those nominally in power are actually at the bottom of an inverted pyramid, serving others. We have no need for foot massages and toe cleans; or entourages and on-stage riders.
Purpose is, for us servant teachers, love-in-action: so it can only shine through undistorted—and so without being hijacked by the Protector—when we have cleared away enough of the trauma within our hearts that twists everything into power and prestige, fame and fortune, victim and abuser, master and slave.
When we teach from this place, all we are doing is tapping into what we call The Connector within us and our students/clients. This inner source of wisdom, everyone’s own inner guru, is what always does the healing/transforming.
An embodied wisdom teacher wields power derived from the Connector — the wise guru and inner shaman we all have inside — not from the Protector. Because The Protector will quickly take the power within transference and turn it into opportunities for, say, adulation and blow jobs.
As teachers/coaches/healers, we merely point the way, provide a map, hold space for heart opening, cultivate the condition for healing, dialogue with the nervous system of our clients and participants, wake up the Connector in them… but we are never doing the work ourselves.
The Connector knows that once a teacher/healer/coach has done all they can to support, inspire, and help integrate awakening and/or transformation, they should ask the student/client to move on and fine another teacher with more relevant and fresh tools and thinking.
Once someone has learned what they can from us, we must send them along to their next teacher—or just go practice what they have learned for a few years in everyday life). We should have no ‘acolytes’ ever, least of all those who cover up their messes from the public, attack critics in workshops and online, and act as apologists for any abuses.
Above all, we never form an (abusive or neglectful) parent and (traumatized) child dynamic with our students/clients. This relationship will disable, disempower, and diminish everyone in the system. So the teacher refuses sycophancy of all kinds: actively and compassionately.
Above all, we must never get high on our own supply. We always know we are always going to be vulnerable and deeply flawed beings who have a Protector ready to hijack anything we do, no matter how heartfelt, and turn into into something that hurts others. Hurt hearts, hurt hearts. When it’s a wisdom teacher, it is truly tainted love.
“Any spiritual teacher who is invested in your growth and empowerment will inspire and guide you to look inward and listen to your own wisdom. A true teacher never allows anyone to worship them. This act is disempowering and breeds dangerous codependency.” Alison McAulay, Embodied Wisdom Teacher & Coach
The Peer-To-Peer Transformation
As someone who does wisdom teaching on the one hand, and transformational innovation on the other, I have come to realize that the issues of guru abuse are symptoms of “fails” in the teacher-pupil paradigm; and guru-disciple business model that underpins it.
As one of the ‘gurus’ of systems change, Peter Senge, says: never blame the person, look to transform the system. The next Buddha must be the sangha, or community. Not an individual but a network. Not a guru but a group. Not another Christ but a Circle.
The network or circle — complete with peer-powered transformation technologies — is the “antidote for, or the completion of, hierarchy” (to quote my peer coach/teacher Scott Vineberg): it flattens out command and control urges, sending power to the edges where it then empowers everyone to switch on and step up with their own transformations.
As teachers, we insight-share and space-hold to create the conditions by which others within the group or circle can heal ruptures in their relational fields. We teach people tools and practices by which clients/students can work with their peers (family, colleagues, lovers, friends, fellow students) to do the inner work together.
We harness our disciplined practice of , and nuanced knowledge about, of meditation, music, movement, and more to help people integrate their realizations and revelations into their body, and embed them into life. But we always know that we are peers in the network/circle/sangha.
As disruptors, my wife/business partner Alison and I have developed entirely plug-and-play toolkits for peer-to-peer leadership coaching and peer-to-peer transformational healing and coaching for individuals. These toolkits, and perhaps one-day software, were specifically and carefully designed over 15 years to balance the power of the teacher and student within us all.
Users leverage their inherent Connector’s power to coach and guide one other to freedom and transformation — but never get lost up their own wazoo. Wisely-designed peer-to-peer systems allow everyone to work with other humans to free themselves from old patterns and embed new repatterns into their leadership and love lives.
In peer-powered horizontal networks, those in vertical positions atop pyramids, whether CEOs or gurus, have to give up power to the people (whilst still being confident yet humble leaders). This mass empowerment is why I got interested in peer-to-peer models in the first place; and why I set up my first business in the dot com days of the late 90s.
The internet rewires the world in its own image of a network. Empowering processes, practices, and places become the routes to transformation rather than reliance on charismatic people.
“A move away from the guru/student parent/child dynamic is a necessary and compassionate act towards all inclined to enquire into deeper questions — but especially those that teach. To expose a guru is to love a guru.” Will Pye
In a transformational network/group /circle /community, many people have some of the truth. They can, and must, share it with others. This is their purpose calling them to act. To be of service they teach with love about love. They can even be paid for it. After all, those diapers don’t pay for themselves. Teachers amplify the potentiality for the wholeness of those they serve.
True wisdom teachers of the 21st Century don’t ever seek to rise up to the top of the outdated pyramid of hierarchy (literally, “rule by the priests”); or seek to sit upon the apex pontificating to subordinates and preaching to acolytes. Sure they teach. Sure they write. Sure they send out Youtube videos and podcast interviews. But they never take their mission too seriously even as they know it is the most important thing on the planet bar none.
If we are going to ride the wide-open plains of the unregulated wild (wild) West of wisdom teaching/coaching/healing, it is essential that we surround ourselves not with people stuck in a “fawning” protective pattern (wanting to be loved or find a rescuer) but those who love us and can act as peer-supervisors: they see us as awesome yet deeply flawed human beings
Given the trappings of power, and the evolutionary design of the Protector to grab onto it to feel safe, I believe that it is essential that every teacher surrounds themselves with friends, lovers — and above all peers — who do not drink their Kool Aid (or at least are not addicted to it); are delighted to burst their bubbles (lovingly, in service); and can elegantly coach them on their blindspots to become ever more purposeful.
If those peers limit the teacher’s own transformation— for example, by relating to the teacher as their past patterning or by cynically bringing them down as a power-play — then that can be an invitation for transformation in their ‘relational fields’ as well.
New peers can be sought that see the teacher as their transformational teaching wholeness (as well as their fragile, vulnerable humanity). The same is true of any disruptive entrepreneur too. Every disruptor needs a little bit of a “reality distortion bubble” to pull people into a new transformative vision. But if they don’t have trusted compadres who can burst the bubble when hubris takes over, fiascos like Fyre Festival are the result.
For me, a combination of a loving and independently-minded wife (who is also my business partner and an embodied wisdom teacher), two smart and on their game kids, and a global network of fellow wisdom teachers and purpose-driven and conscious entrepreneurs keeps my hubris well in check… whilst also supporting that chutzpah to keep going out into a system that resists transformation to do my purpose-work.
Embodied Wisdom: Footstool Theory
There is still very much a role for an embodied wisdom teacher within this network-sangha, as long as we see ourselves as one in a node in a network, or one a point within a circle.
I take to heart the Jewish mystical saying: don’t take up too much space but don’t take up too little either. Suffering is everywhere. People are yearning for support, for inspiration, and for guidance. If we have teachings and practices that can alleviate the suffering—after years and years of our own humbling stumbling—then our dharma is to offer it to others as a teacher/healer. Nothing else can suffice
Yet no matter how much other-worldly spiritual brilliance and “crazy wisdom” we (profess to) have, we must also have this-worldly integrity and old-fashioned social morality: we pay money back if it’s owed; we show up on time to meetings, always respecting others time as much as our own; we don’t cheat on our partners; polyamory is consciously consensual by all parties (with no-one really wishing they were in committed monogamy); we can be relied upon to change diapers and be present for our children’s bathtime; we are transparent about our business dealings and happy to explain all and any profits; we are ready to own our own contribution to anyone’s upset.
This means we are embodied wisdom teachers, not disembodied minds competing for attention in the gurusphere. We are congruent and coherent: our everyday actions and emotions align with our wise words and wonderful philosophies. We know deep down that whilst we package up and share teachings, we don’t “own” them (and such teaching are never a complete system that has no fragilities or frailties).
Embodied wisdom teachers walk the Middle Way between nihilism and absolutism, between hubris and humility, between chutzpah and chochmah: modern-day bodhisattvas vowed to spread the love… without the need for big paybacks in Rolls Royces, Youtube likes, or adulating crowds
If we as a wisdom teacher, of all people, can’t laugh at how our Protector has taken control of the ship, and release our protective patterning go quickly as we can transform it in real-time with presence, then we are clearly hooked on our own supply. Time to stop teaching and start learning again!
If we are constantly seeking likes/followers/claps, desiring people to use our brand name over our birth name, or quoting Watkin’s annual list of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People”… then the Protector is like on the prowl and needs a spot of coaching (and hugging). We have moved out from our body, which is always grounded in the great ground of all being. and into disembodied and dissociated protective patterning.
Perhaps embodied wisdom teaching starts, and possibly ends, with being able to come into an open-hearted, reciprocal, and interdependent relationship (then dialogue) with anyone, without needing to be on a pedestal of any kind.
In other words, we can be with any human (and element of nature) without needing to be mysterious, hard to reach, inaccessible, or hidden behind acolytes or media walls—and without grasping for higher status with passively aggressive ways of teaching.
We teachers must sit atop a footstool from time to time: just above others to be seen fully. Otherwise, people won’t get much value from us. Students/clients cannot see who is speaking and sharing. They cannot connect with us or relate to us as we are blurred by the crowd. They probably cannot hear us either.
But we never sit atop a pedestal (nor a fancy throne), no matter how tempting it may be to the Protector within us. When people provide us with such a pedestal—literally, metaphorically, or metaphysically—we resist its siren song with all our healing/wholing heart.
For the Connector within, the One that actually does the real teaching and healing, is always a learner. So we are always ready to jettison the footstool in a heartbeat, handing it off to a peer as we melt back into the community, from whence we came, to learn again. W
Whenever The Protector is in command, the Connector must be invited back in to heal, transform, and start over with what the Buddhists call “beginner’s mind”. The true embodied wisdom master is a perpetual pupil because life, and so consciousness is always dynamic.
Thus we can move from floor to footstool—and back again—in an instant: always ready to serve, always ready to observe.
The Atman/Brahman within, the wisdom teacher we all have inside, is a node in the network of humanity—and all life. It is the jewel within Indra’s vast net. Anyone can call anybody out on anything (patterns, amorality, lack of integrity), at anytime (with respect and responsibility). There are no disciples to abuse. There are no acolytes to enable us. There are no gurus to break bad.
Now what?
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