What Experience Are You Supposed to Be Having?

I found peace and solace in a spiritual community. Then came the scandal.

Photo credit: Sergio Mena Ferreira on Unsplash

At a Catskills meditation center in 2015, I scrubbed pots in the kitchen while, in the next room, our witty and insightful teacher gave the afternoon talk. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I did hear the occasional eruptions of student laughter. I scraped congealed tempeh stroganoff off stainless steel, feeling lonely and angry.

I wasn’t mad that I had to do dishes—that was part of the deal. I had signed up to be a volunteer staff member for the weekend retreat, a training run by a Buddhist organization called Shambhala. I got free admission in exchange for doing various tasks—checking people in, setting up the tea service, cleaning up after breakfast. I had done this many times before and it was usually great—after hours of sitting in meditation, simple tasks like chopping carrots or folding tablecloths felt almost sublime.

But this weekend, I wasn’t feeling sublime—I was pissed off. The retreat was ridiculously understaffed, and I spent my days dashing from one chore to the next—cleaning bathrooms, setting up the sound system, clearing lunch plates, and bringing the teacher water on a silver tray. I had almost no time to meditate, or listen to the talks, or join the group discussions with the bright and thoughtful people I was serving. I had come here to calm my mind and gain insights into the nature of reality, not grind away on a non-stop chore-a-thon.

I complained to the teacher, Jason, during our one-on-one interview. “This isn’t what I signed on for,” I said. “I don’t feel like I’m having the experience I’m supposed to be having.”

Jason looked at me, his face as open as the sky. “What experience are you supposed to be having?” he asked.

Immediately, I got it. Shambhala wasn’t a spa. It was a place where I trained my mind to deal with the rest of my life, where I learned to cultivate patience and grace, to work with the unexpected and course-correct.

I had joined the organization five years earlier, and since then I had become happier, calmer and kinder. At Shambhala, I felt liberated from my default cynicism. I was developing faith—not in a creator or an afterlife or a guru—but in life itself. I was starting to believe that good people (that is, most people) would wake up from our narcissistic daydreams and work together to create a better world—a world where people truly understand that we are not separate from the planet or each other, so we had better take care of things.

After my conversation with Jason, I glided serenely through the rest of the weekend—straightening shoes in the hallway, fetching tissues for sobbing participants. I came home feeling happy and refreshed.

A nice little redemption story. The suffering was all in my mind. Happiness was just an attitude-shift away.

I enjoyed many teachable moments like this during my nine years in Shambhala. In the trainings and retreats, I learned how to practice what the self-help authors preach—to find happiness from within and transcend external circumstances. Those weekends I spent sweeping floors and wiping down sinks left me feeling a kind of peace unparalleled in any other aspect of my life.

So, there was a scandal. In 2018, the leader of the organization, known as the Sakyong Mipham, was credibly accused of sexual abuse and left the country. A page-one New York Times story describes the allegations. He had cornered women at dinner parties and demanded sexual favors from infatuated followers. He had a fleet of attendants, people who would fetch devoted young beauties from his audiences and escort them to his chambers. He presided over wild parties where he would start reciting poetry and instruct attendees to take off their clothes.

The Shambhala described in the Times piece bore little resemblance to place where I’d had my fruitful conversation with Jason. That Shambhala was a small mountain lodge where I’d meet kind and thoughtful neighbors for Tuesday-night talks on topics like “relaxing into uncertainty” and “cultivating lovingkindness.” At the tea-and-cookies receptions afterwards, people talked about their hikes, their art projects, their environmental activism.

Still, I wasn’t shocked by the allegations. The cynical part of me had noted the organization’s culty elements ever since I’d first walked into a Shambhala center. The organization was founded by Mipham’s father, Chogyam Trungpa, a former Tibetan lama who was also widely known as a womanizer and alcoholic (ding!). Later, leadership was passed on to the son (ding! ding!). It always bugged me that Mipham’s and Trungpa’s pictures were prominently displayed at the shrine of every center, and that Shambhala teachers like Jason rarely quoted Buddhist masters other than these two men (ding! ding! ding!). Once, while setting up the shrine before a weekend retreat, I was barefoot and wearing a prairie skirt (staff volunteers were supposed to dress up) while feather-dusting Mipham’s picture. My younger, more cynical self balked. What have I become? 

I was barefoot and wearing a prairie skirt while feather-dusting Mipham’s picture. My younger, more cynical self balked. What have I become? 

I also felt uncomfortable with the way some longtime members talked about Mipham. When they said his name, their voices had the happy chirpy sound you get when talking about a new boyfriend. No one ever told me I had to revere Mipham, but after I’d hung around Shambhala long enough reverence was assumed.

Then there was the work. Yes, at Shambhala I learned how to get into the groove of doing menial chores and find enjoyment in them. But the pressure to take on such tasks continued to grow. The center needed volunteers: to staff the trainings, to weed the gardens, to help install the new windows, to manage the bookstore, to tear down drywall for the kitchen renovation.

I wanted to do my part to keep the center going, but what exactly was I supporting? Not a church or a charity, but a private organization that distributed and promoted copyrighted material produced by the men whose portraits I feather-dusted.

In this light, my redemption tale looks different—more like the story of a woman who was treated unfairly and then manipulated into thinking the problem was in her own mind, from an organization that extracted her free labor and then called it a “teaching.”

I still haven’t reconciled this. After the scandal, I stuck around Shambhala for a while, trying to determine whether the organization could redeem itself. Then the pandemic hit, and there wasn’t really anything to quit.

What experience are you supposed to be having?

Since 2015, many of us can agree: Not this one.

In the before times, even lefty cranks like me thought we were basically going in the right direction. Back then, when I was in my forties, I became a budding idealist who thought good people would come together and common sense would prevail. We would save ourselves—from the ravages of climate change and assault weapons and for-profit health care. Now, I look back wearily at my younger, more cynical self — fine, bitch, you were right.

But if the cynical girl could keep me in check during the Shambhala years, maybe the starry-eyed middle-aged woman can help me through this time.

She’s the one who reminds me that when I step away from the news feed, I see good, honest people everywhere. The neighbor training a rescue puppy in her front yard. The young people knocking on my door and asking me to sign a petition supporting affordable-housing laws. The friend spending a day cooking in her kitchen and inviting us over.

The world might be run by people with empathy-deficiency problems, but most people aren’t like that.

Shambhala opened me up and gave me access to wisdom I didn’t have before. I discovered this wisdom through the lens of two broken men, but they were never its source. That wisdom is just out there, in all the quietly kind people we see every day.

The inherent decency of most people is no longer enough to give me hope for the future. But now, in this very messed up timeline, I appreciate it more than ever.

How have you processed the trauma of the past several years? What experience are you supposed to be having?