--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote: > > "When yogi Amrit Desai's Kripalu Yoga community fell apart > in 1994, an enormous sense of betrayal swept his disciples. > A public disclosure of the master's secret affairs and > manipulation of power and money over twenty years disil- > lusioned many. Yet because he was also a creative and wise > teacher, students were able to use the very practices he had > taught them--of inquiry, balance, and compassion--to deal > with their loss. After months of difficult meetings and > councils, the master was asked to leave and the students > were left to work with their confusion and despair. Over > the years since, the community has rebuilt itself, dedicated > to the principles of yoga and healthy spirituality that the > crisis of betrayal taught them. And the master too claims he > has learned important lessons from this process." > > - Jack Kornfield
Thanks for posting these Kornfield quotes, Vaj. I don't know him, but will now work to correct that. Can you recommend a good book to start with? What he says above rings so true for me, given my experience with the Rama trip, and with dif- ferent Internet forums in the time since, watch- ing as students "used the very practices their teachers had taught them" to work not only with but *through* their confusion and despair, and rebuild. Rebuild lives, rebuild spiritual communities shattered by abuse. In my case, I used one of Rama's favorite sayings, "Listen to what people say, but watch what they DO," *on him*. I started putting him to his *own* tests. And he didn't measure up to the standards that he himself had set. So I walked away. And in the time since a lot of his students have banded together on Internet discussion boards similar to Fairfield Life, trying to figure out "What just happened?," and more important, "What happens now?" There is a lot to be learned from watching a spiritual organization you were once part of implode. I am told that Chogyam Trungpa used to refer to his method of teaching as "The path of fucking up." He believed, based on his experience teaching in Asia and around the world, that students tended to learn more from their fuckups (or those of their teachers or superiors) than they did from their successes. Maybe that's why he fucked up so much...to give them "meat" to chew on. :-) Whatever. All I know is that I wouldn't trade the EDUCATION I got from walking away from two spiritual organizations that had been important to me for anything I learned while within them. Talk about "bleaching the cloth." It's EASY to sit back *within* an organization and think that its teachings are valuable while never having to put them to the test. It's often not as easy to walk away, and use those *same* teachings to look back and examine "What just happened?" using them. Students whose organizations cannot admit that they fuck up rarely get to experience this kind of education.
