Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening with Dr Connie Zweig

Thank you to everyone who attended this online Education & Growth webinar event.

The recording is now available below.  

Description

Dr. Connie Zweig, author of bestselling books on the Shadow, deepens and expands the theme of our last community gathering. Connie offers a presentation and group discussion which will move this topic into the spiritual domain.

Today we witness social media and published reports of spiritual teachers in every tradition who claim the highest reaches of human consciousness, yet who act out sexual assault, emotional abuse, and financial coercion in extreme ways—including Hindu swamis, Zen roshis, Tibetan llamas, Hasidic rabbis, Catholic priests, Protestant clergy.

Are you reading this and saying to yourself, “Not me. I’m not at risk.”

Or “Not my teacher. She’s awake.”

This denial is epidemic – and part of the problem. It leads us to look away from red flags – in ourselves and in our teachers – reinforcing spiritual naivete and often resulting in destructive behavior. This then leads us to ignore our own intuition, our bodily instincts, our sense of agency, and our intent to do no harm. In denial, we continue to imagine a religious or spiritual life without an encounter with human darkness.

How can we support spiritual teachers to add shadow-awareness to their practices?

How can we support students, before disillusionment, to cultivate shadow-awareness in themselves and to discern Shadow tendencies in others?

How can we support students, after disillusionment, who feel traumatized and betrayed, to uncover their unconscious projections and rekindle their yearning for awakening?

A fortunate few find the narrow path through the descent, the meeting with human darkness, and undergo an initiation: We travel from spiritual innocence toward a new level of consciousness—spiritual maturity. This is the dance of darkness and light in our search for awakening.

About Our Guest Speaker

CONNIE ZWEIG PhD is a retired therapist, and author of Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, which extends her work on the Shadow into midlife and beyond, and the forthcoming book Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening (May 2023, now available for pre-order). Connie has been doing and teaching contemplative practices for more than 50 years.

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Video Replay

Jac O’Keeffe   Hello everybody, welcome to an ASI webinar. Hello from wherever you are all over our beautiful planet.

In our last webinar, which you can see on YouTube or through a link on the ASI website, we had Kimberly Lafferty speaking in general about the shadow, the part of our own selves, our own personality that we can’t see and things to look out for. And there was a huge amount of interest in it. And what struck me was it was a completely new concept for some of our members and friends and for others it’s their bread and butter. It’s the work that they do as spiritual leaders, looking at the shadow aspect of what we need to bring awareness to and honesty and integrity to within ourselves. And so we have this broad spectrum as we often find in the ASI. We’ve got newcomers to a particular topic and we’ve got people who professionally work in that area.

And so what we decided to do was let’s dive deeper into this area of shadow to address the complexities and I suppose to offer like an authentic definition of shadow that’s accessible for all of us. And so Connie, who’s been with the ASI since the beginning, I think, has written several books on this and she seems to be very well placed to share with us her 50 years of contemplative practice and all the work on shadow work that she has done. So that’s why we have this follow up on shadow work because we want to dive deeper. So to specifically introduce Connie, I’m going to hand you over to Phil, who knows Connie for quite a while. Thank you, everybody.

Phil Goldberg  Yes, I do. I have known Connie since the mid-70s when we were children. And before, when she was editing books, I knew her before she wrote books. And I’m pleased to say we’ve been friends all these years. Connie is a retired therapist. Her wonderful books include Meeting the Shadow, Romancing the Shadow, and her most recent book, The Inner Work of Age Shifting from Role to Soul, which I found very illuminating as somebody reluctantly entering elderhood. And her new book, forthcoming, available now for pre-order, is Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path, something we can all relate to, subtitled The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening. So I now introduce officially my old friend, Connie Zweig.

Connie Zweig   Thank you, Phil. Thank you, Jac. Thank you for having me. Hi, everybody. So lovely to see your faces and know that we share this intimate connection around spiritual practice. Kind of makes automatic community, doesn’t it?

So what we’re going to do this morning is a quick PowerPoint in order to just expand the context that we started with in the last meeting about projection. And then we’re going to open it up for conversation, because I know many of you will have insights and comments of your own, and I can answer questions if those come up as well. So I’m going to start now. This presentation and the new book are called Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening. And I’m eager to hear from you if you have experienced meeting a shadow in yourself, in a teacher, in a group. I’m eager to talk about that with you.

So in every tradition, saints and poets speak of the soul search for the beloved, the seekers yearning for the divine, for the self beyond ego. I call this holy longing from the poem by Goethe. And this holy longing is a secret feeling with many disguises that leads us to pursue a higher union in spiritual practice, religious discipleship, and even romantic embrace. It guides us to timeless wisdom and transcendent experiences.

But it can also go awry when we project the divine onto a person, priest, guru, rabbi, or Roshi, who’s all too human, who has unhealed wounds, undeveloped empathy, maybe authoritarian tendencies. And in effect, a woman or a man who has a shadow. And if he or she abuses power, whether the abuse is sexual, financial or emotional coercion, we feel the shock of betrayal. Our innocence is lost and for many of us, our faith is shaken. We might say, he can’t be enlightened as he claimed, or she has secrets. She’s not who I thought she was. Or the priest lied and the congregation was duped. So in our time, we’ve witnessed many contemporary teachers of Buddhism, Hinduism, Hasidism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant groups act out their shadows in destructive ways, leaving their followers traumatized and lost.

And some of us have experienced religious or spiritual abuse ourselves firsthand and others may have experienced witnessing it. But we may not have had spiritual shadow work to help us rekindle the flame of longing in our souls. Some of us may have met our own shadows as teachers ourselves, perhaps shocked at our own words and behaviors.

So let’s take a step back together and just be sure that we’re all on the same page. What is the shadow? Jac mentioned it briefly in her introduction. Personal shadow is a term coined by the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung to refer to the personal unconscious.

The shadow develops in each of us as children, as we identify with socially acceptable traits like politeness or generosity or caretaking to find love and acceptance from adults. And in this way, we form a conscious ego and we banish the opposite traits – rudeness, stinginess, self-centeredness – into the unconscious shadow. And so the ego and the shadow develop in tandem. So if our sadness is shamed, it’s exiled into the shadow. If our anger is punished, it’s banished too. If our musical or artistic talent is banished, I mean is dismissed or is shamed in some way, is not valued, then it gets buried in the shadow. And our ego develops to accommodate the loss of those authentic feelings.

In the same way, in a spiritual community, if our anger or sadness are forbidden, we develop a spiritual persona to find belonging and acceptance. And those other feelings, those unwelcome feelings go into the shadow. So if a spiritual teacher forbids sex, those impulses are banished and we lose our connection to traits, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that don’t fit our communities or belief systems.

And because the shadow is beneath the threshold of awareness, we can’t gaze at it directly. It’s like a blind spot in our field of vision. So with shadow work, we can learn how to listen to the inner voices that lead us to do the same things that we’ve always done without the results we want. We can begin to detect these voices as shadow characters and work with them in a specific way.

Today, I’m going to share an introduction to the shadow on the spiritual path, the ways in which we meet the hidden, unacceptable, forbidden parts of ourselves or others in our spiritual lives.

Daily accounts of the eruption of human shadow bombard us today in the social and the political arenas. But there’s been little exploration of shadow in the spiritual domain. We live through a tidal wave of Catholic priest-child sexual abuse scandals in the 80s. And today we see on social media and published reports, teachers in every tradition who claim the highest reaches of human consciousness and yet who act out sexual assault, emotional abuse, and financial coercion.

And yet, despite all this, we continue to imagine that a spiritual life can be possible without an encounter with human darkness. Why do we continue to be shocked and betrayed when it erupts? The Me Too movement went viral in 2017 to raise awareness of sexual violence in the workplace, military, universities, and other settings, but it didn’t publicly address abuse in a spiritual context. But it did help survivors and witnesses in spiritual communities to connect online and empower each other and encourage whistleblowers to out spiritual leaders and religious leaders. And some all-powerful teachers could no longer control the narratives in their isolated kingdoms. Some fled the country or lost legal battles.

In one chapter, I tell the tales of dozens of renowned teachers who fell from grace. And you probably know their names. When a group of Tibetan Buddhist survivors of abuse provided a document of allegations to the Dalai Lama, it was called Me Too Guru. It’s evident from my research that we also need a spiritual justice movement. But only 13 states have penal statutes that support the criminal prosecution of clergy for sex with a congregant.

So from childhood through late life, many people long for God, spirit, transcendence, a sense of the divine. When you imagine God, what do you see? Or the gods or the divine? What do you see? A stern bearded male perched on a throne with angels circling his head? A beatific Madonna with an innocent child at her breast? A black four-armed goddess dancing on a corpse? Indra’s net as it weaves through and interconnects all living things? The letters of a holy name? A colorful mandala? A sacred mountain? A vast sparkling void? So each religion comes with its own images of the divine and they may inspire awe, love, fear, guilt, or doubt. In some Eastern traditions, they’re objects of contemplation, evoking spiritual qualities in the aspirant.

Carl Jung explored this God image in myth and in the psyches of his patients. For me, the God image is the hidden object of desire, typically hidden in the shadow and pointing us towards something beyond ego and arousing our holy longing. When we find a sacred teacher or a spiritual guide who evokes our soul’s longing, our image of God leaps out of our inner world and onto an idealized human being. And we’re filled with exalted feelings of devotion in the presence of our ideal.

In our psyches, the teacher has realized in human form the ideal other living within the student, the image of the complete or self-realized human being. And so in the inner world of the student, the teacher carries the student’s own highest authority, the parent who won’t fail him, the God-like human whose attributes she strives to emulate. For the student to recognize the teacher as such, there must be a match between the inner image and the outer person. The arrow of projection fits the target and the student feels a fit, an inward yes.

Carl Jung called this an archetypal projection as distinct from a personal parental projection. Once activated, this projection holds a promise and a duty, an inspiration and a burden.

Now on the flip side, the teacher basks in the admiration and devotion of the student. He may feel himself enlarged in her gaze. In some cases, teachers unconsciously come to emotionally depend on this adoration, like food. And so they behave in ways that exact exclusive obedience from their followers. With a lack of moral development, they may act out their shadows in destructive ways.

So what would lead us as independent, developed adults to endow another human being with so much power and authority that we feel blind faith in her? Our tender longings activate vulnerable feelings of childlike devotion. Each of us carries unmet childhood needs into adulthood, unconscious longing to merge with the powerful figure for protection against frightening feelings of powerlessness or abandonment. And so we’re susceptible to the vagaries of human authorities who appear to be benign. So when two people meet and feel a deep connection, their hearts open, but so do their imaginations. And through projection, the shadow expels both positive and negative traits by attributing them to other people and disowning them in ourselves.

And every so often, this arrow shoots out unpredictably. Oh, that person is so stupid or that person is so wise and compassionate. And so we might say something nasty or we might fall in love. In our discussion here, we might begin to surrender to an idealized teacher and our early needs to feel special and to be seen, to keep secrets, to feel belonging are all at play. But neither person is typically aware of this dynamic.

So some of us unconsciously seek teachers like our parents and others seek those who are different. But the shadow has its own agenda. People meet teachers who seem at a conscious level to be different from their parents. But later, when the shadow erupts, they discover he or she is a lot like a parent. In other words, a teacher may appear to be gentle and compassionate, but when he’s angry, he becomes a critical know-it-all, just like a woman’s father. Or when he gains wealth, he becomes a materialistic consumer, just like a follower’s family. And then he begins urging people to keep his secret, just like family secrets in alcoholic families. And so it’s an unconscious match. The shadow in each of them is unconsciously recreating a relationship and bringing an opportunity for spiritual shadow work to expand our awareness of these hidden parts of ourselves.

What happens when the projection rattles? Have you experienced spiritual or religious abuse of power? Sexual coercion? Financial coercion? Let’s explore each of these now.

So our clergy and spiritual teachers, even when awake in advanced stages of consciousness, are still human and not perfect. If a teacher’s ego becomes inflated with success, surrounded by adoring followers and props of a lineage, she may come to feel the right to sit on a golden throne and increase her authority without limits. Using power to serve the ego’s agenda, the teacher’s danger grows, and soon she doesn’t have power, power has her. It becomes an unconscious complex, acted out on the stage of the most sacred arena of life.

Teachers may subject their followers to verbal abuse, physical violence, emotional control, withholding of love and approval, and threats of punishment and expulsion. You know, you won’t, if you do that, if you leave here, you won’t gain salvation. Or if you don’t do this, you’ll have a bad reincarnation for many lives. And power and sex go hand in hand. An incursion may be careless or aggressive, subtle or traumatic. But many teachers and clergy use sex to express power, intimidate others, and feed their own emptiness.

The high profile cases of the Me Too movement reposed questions about power and gender. Who has the power? Who has consent? Can someone consent if her career, education, mental health, or finances, or in our case, spiritual well-being, is controlled by the person who wants sex? The power differential between clergy or spiritual teachers and their acolytes make consent questionable [inaudible]. And this is a key insight for teachers who feel sexual attraction to students and believe they can act with impunity.

Like sex, money can become the ego’s tool. It’s the root of all evil. It’s the grail we seek. And it carries the projection of divine energies. And it can be worshipped like a false god in the form of a sleek private jet, a shiny Rolls Royce, a golden throne. And financial coercion can be covert and overt, such as when a teacher demands access to a student’s inheritance. The reports of so many teachers living lifestyles of excess, in contrast to their teachings and in contrast to those who serve them with seva, are deeply disheartening.

So when examined together, the incidents of spiritual abuse reveal patterns across denominations. Let me just read these briefly because we can talk about them in the discussion if you want.

So the priest or teacher exploits others for his or her own narcissistic needs. The teacher’s transgressions are often boundary violations. The member chosen for abuse is made to feel special. Other people enable the behavior. Members deny their own feelings, doubts, and intuition. They seek to maintain the projection at all costs. They rationalize hurtful behavior, often with spiritual teachings. Shameful secrets glue the system together. And members are threatened with retaliation for disclosure or wishing to leave.

At some point, a student or a believer can no longer tolerate being the subject of overt shaming or sexual violence. Or she can no longer tolerate being a witness to hypocrisy or coercion. The moments of choice come and go as he or she calculates the risk of staying and the risks of leaving. And it’s a tense, challenging, painful period for any member of a church, synagogue, satsang, sangha, or zendo.

If she can break through and begin real self-reflection, here are some questions to start the journey. Depend on your role in relation to the teacher. Do you feel more free and authentic in this role or more trapped and controlled? Feel the tension between your devotion and your growing need for autonomy and self-expression. What did you give away in projection to your idealized other? What traits did he or she carry for you? And so what did you banish into your own shadow?

This inner work for me is a kind, a relative kind of waking up. That’s what I, that’s how I think of it. It builds a bridge between psychology and spiritual practice so that we don’t succumb to spiritual bypass. Using beliefs and practices to avoid facing our wounds and eventually acting out the shadow. So I’m going to give you a brief overview of some of the steps of spiritual shadow work and then we’ll have a conversation.

So first and foremost, have you given away your spiritual essence? Have you projected your spiritual authority? In my training as a psychologist, I was taught to carry projection by a client until the right moment to give it back, to send the internal authority or the voice of the higher self back to a client and release the projection that I carry and return it to the inner world of the other person. If we believe the words, God, Guru and self are one, how do we act on them? How do we live this with our students?

The next step is self-reflection about our beliefs. Have you accepted a teacher’s definitions of spirituality and moral behavior? Have you projected your certainty and banished your doubts? And what do you need to reclaim your critical thinking? Have you banished some authentic feelings, but maybe grief, anger, sexuality in order to shape a spiritual persona? And what’s your biggest fear of reclaiming those feelings? Do you believe the impulses of the body are dangerous temptations? And which bodily sensations have you forbidden? What would happen if you began to allow them to arise? What do you need to feel safe to reconnect with your body? And finally, have you become passive, submissive, giving up action in your own behalf? Are you unable to feel or express doubt? What do you need to act on your own behalf and reclaim your agency? What do you need to separate from an abusive relationship, a community?

With the collapse of projections, the real inner work begins. We can see through our projections to the humanity in the other person, the darkness and light, the fallibility and divinity. And slowly we come to see that our beloved guide, mentor, analyst, or guru is not responsible for carrying the divine for us. We recognize that what they carried for us was inside of us all along. And we can reclaim those projections and carry both our own wounds and our own greatness.

And then we need others in a different way. We may still need guides and teachers, but we don’t need them to parent us or even maybe to connect us to the divine, but to join us in the dance between love and freedom, union and autonomy. A fortunate few find the narrow path through the darkness and undergo an initiation. We travel from spiritual innocence through the dark descent toward a new level of consciousness, spiritual maturity. We evolve from dependency on a spiritual parent through meeting the shadow toward spiritual adulthood. We become fertile soil for new life, open, but not naive, eager, but not impatient, ripe for blossoming. And with practice, we learn to meet the darkness in ourselves and in our teachers, gradually coming to accept it as a part of being human, but no longer susceptible to its abuse.

For some, this inner work requires separation from a teacher and community. For others, it requires becoming a whistleblower or staying to reimagine and redesign the group. It requires that we reclaim all that was sacrificed onto an idealized teacher because our capacity to carry our own greatness was diminished, and now it’s expanded to contain it. And then as we carry our own light, settled in being or pure consciousness or vast awareness, we begin to witness our thinking and no longer identify with it. We begin to witness our feeling and no longer identify with it. We begin to witness the body and no longer identify with it. We begin to release agency and experience the flow of life and the divine through us.

So I want to open an invitation to anyone who’s interested in reading the book and doing spiritual shadow work with community support. I’ll be forming free leaderless online groups whose intention is to read the book together and do practices in community. If you’re interested in spiritual shadow support groups, you can send me an email, conniezweig@gmail.com, put spiritual shadow work in the subject line, and I’ll connect you with other people in your area. Thank you. I’m going to come back now. So I’d love to hear your comments, your insights, your thoughts and feelings about this, your experiences.

Jac O’Keeffe   Feel free to unmute yourself if somebody would like to speak, or if you’re somebody who’d like to put your hand up, then please go ahead.

Connie Zweig   Hi, David.

David Spector Hello, sorry to be the first one to speak. I think it’s an important subject. I like the talk because it seemed to be about spiritual abuse or abuse of spiritual teachers, which I think is an extremely important topic. The only problem that I had with it was that some of the words were not well defined, and I’m not already familiar with them. So I didn’t follow a lot of the talk because of the particular words, and I’ve written them down. The shadow itself was not defined. Reclaiming was not defined, and reclaiming was used in connection with feelings, body, agency, and projections. Also projections were not defined. I understood most of the rest, but with those key words not being clear to me, I did have some problems.

Connie Zweig   Okay, so let’s do a quick review of some of the terminology. I really apologize for that. I thought I defined all those terms.

So the shadow is that part of us in the brain, mind, body that contains material that’s unacceptable to the ego. And that’s why the popular conception of shadow is that it’s negative. It’s only negative in relation to ego. So if the ego thinks something is bad, taboo, ugly, forbidden, often what happens is that we learn as kids or as teenagers or even as adults to stuff it. And whatever doesn’t get expressed, get lived out in our lives, gets repressed.

So I’ll give you an example for me. So when I was little, my father only wanted to see me happy. And if I looked sad or unhappy, he felt like he was failing. And he told me that over and over again. And so I learned that a certain range of feeling was not acceptable if I wanted to be loved and accepted by him. And when I went into my spiritual community in my early 20s, there was the same message. Life is bliss. You should be happy. And that spiritual message resonated with that early childhood message of what was not okay. And the material that’s not okay gets buried.

We don’t have to use the word shadow. You can say unconscious. But it goes into the body. It goes into the cells, the muscles, it goes into the mind. And it goes into the blind spot. So it’s beneath our awareness. We can no longer see it. And for me, I remember someone saying to me, it might have been my sister or a friend, someone said to me in my 20s, why do you always look so blissy? Like, what’s so good about life that you always look so blissy? And I recognized in that moment that I had adopted a spiritual persona, and I had buried in my unconscious shadow, a lot of other feelings that were not acceptable first to my father and then to my teacher.

So sometimes what happens is the material that we bury in the shadow, we then project, which means we unconsciously attribute it to somebody else. So if I look at somebody else who looks, and I have an exaggerated emotional response, let’s say to a stranger, I walk into a party, I don’t know this person, but I have an exaggerated emotional response. And I make an assumption about that person. He’s so seductive, or he’s a workaholic, or whatever it is, right? Could be anything. It could also be a positive trait. That teacher is so compassionate, he would never do anything to hurt anyone. Could also be that, right? Then what’s happening is we’re unconsciously projecting, we’re attributing to that person something we don’t really know about them that may be hidden in ourselves. So if I look at someone who looks lazy to me, I know it’s a projection because laziness is not acceptable to me. It’s a trait that just that I would never see in myself. Right?

So that’s sort of the, those are the basic definitions. I hope that’s helpful to you. The sort of the hidden, invisible psychodynamic of the teacher-student relationship from my point of view as a depth psychologist is based in projection. We wouldn’t give so much trust and surrender to a teacher if we didn’t have some kind of projection on that person, that that person was safe, or loving, or unconditional, or wise, or enlightened, or fully awake. We wouldn’t behave in that way unless we had some kind of projection.

Now the projection may fit. That person may be fully awake. The projection can fit. It’s like, you know, the arrow hits the target, or that person I think is lazy really may be lazy in the projection fits. It’s not only fantasy, but the idea is that it starts here. And it often has to do with what’s in our own unconscious shadow. Is that helpful?

David Spector To be honest, not really. It sounds like psychology and I don’t have any background in psychology like Freudian or Jungian. My background is in pure consciousness, being aware of pure consciousness and finding that it just makes all problems disappear.

Connie Zweig   Okay. So one of the things I wanted to contribute to ASI was some psychology because when I listened to the webinars, I kind of felt like the insights from psychology were missing. And that may not fit for everybody. That’s okay. May not be necessary for everyone. Anyone else?

Rebecca        Hi Connie.

Connie Zweig   Hi Rebecca.

Rebecca        Hi. Incredible presentation. It just was so meaningful to me throughout. I’m from Edmonton, Alberta. And one of the reasons I bring that up is we’ve had a very public situation with a spiritual leader here. Is it okay to name that?

Connie Zweig   It’s up to you. Has it been in the press? Yes. Okay.

Rebecca        Yes.

Connie Zweig   Okay.

Rebecca        So John DeRuiter and it’s affected people that I know personally and that people that I know that have followed him. And the reason I’m bringing it up is to a lesser extent, a smaller yoga group that my daughter taught with. She was the whistleblower on his behavior. And so this is really rippled through to me as a mother and how what you’re talking about, my shadow side, her shadow side, me suppressing certain emotions. And I certainly was like your father. I don’t know how much I expressed it outwardly, but I thought being a good mother was my child would never be sad. And so, you know, we dealt with the alcoholism, it’s out of the closet. We’re all in recovery programs, etc, etc. But nonetheless, in her, you know, adult years, the shadow side has just wreaked havoc with her life. And she’s still, you know, recovering from addictions and different things as a coping mechanism.

And my question to you right now is, can you help me unravel the understanding of when there’s this strong need to, in essence, take down the person that hurt you. And in my daughter’s case, she’s also taking care of herself. And she’s getting counseling and doing a lot of work. But part of her mission is that this be public that this person not be allowed to perpetrate this behavior. Unlike other people in the yoga community that are just still it was part of the code of conduct, keeping it suppressed. And so I’m aware of this in other settings. But here in Edmonton, these two kind of public ones have touched my life personally. And I’d love any insights you could share with me on that aspect.

Connie Zweig   That’s such a good question. So the way that I’m hearing you is, why do people have such different responses to this behavior? And is there a right way to respond?

I don’t think there’s a right way, you know, right way for everyone to respond. It’s very individual. I mentioned some people will want to separate from a teacher and some people won’t and so on. So for people who, one of the consequences of undergoing, suffering religious or spiritual abuse with post-traumatic stress consequences is an identity crisis. Who am I? Who am I if I am not this person’s devotee? Or who am I if he’s not really awake? And I put all my trust in him. Am I a victim, a survivor? Am I a consort? Am I a secret keeper? Am I a secret wife, a lover? Am I? And so these labels get attached to our identity. If we’re not living in non-dual awareness, we have lots of local identities, right?

So in this case, we undergo abuse. I am a victim. And therefore the victim behaves in a certain way. The victim wants retribution or revenge. Victim wants a voice and wants everyone to know. We watched this during the days of the Me Too movement with different women in Hollywood and how they came out with different timing and different messages and different, you know, we watched that process very publicly. And this goes on in every community where there’s abuse. So one person responds with this identity of the victim and the need and the idea that there can only be recovery if I speak out and this is stopped. Right? And even, you know, with sexual abuse, that message is also very clear in our culture. Go to your abuser, talk it out. If you can’t get reconciliation, sue. You know, there’s a lot of litigation around abuse and so forth. So there is that sort of activist response.

And then there are other people and there, you know, I tell many stories about this. There are people who do not choose to leave a teacher or a community. It may be because they can’t emotionally separate, but it may actually be because they choose, okay, this, the meaning that I gained or the spiritual experience that I gained was more valuable to me than the hardship or the suffering. So I’m going to choose to stay and I’m going to begin to see if I can change the system.

So this happened, remember Kripalu Yoga Center on the East Coast? So this happened in that community. It also happened with the LA Zen Center where people decided to look at the systemic causes of the abuse. It’s not just the single teacher who’s a perpetrator, but the whole system that was supporting his or her behavior. And there are many, many parts of that. There are cultural issues. There are organizational issues that enable abuse in a system, in a community.

And so, you know, for example, at Kripalu, Yogi Amrit Desai made a lot of public apologies. He brought in psychologists and consultants. They began to reorganize the community. Eventually, first he denied, of course, the first response is denial. No, he didn’t sleep with her. And then another person came out. Finally, he admitted he slept with these women. But eventually he was asked to leave and they reorganized in a more kind of non-hierarchical democratic kind of system.

The same thing happened at the LA Zen Center with this very, I think he was a hundred years old at the time, Maizumi Roshi. And then Roshi Wendy Nakao came in and she just took everything down and rebuilt it from the bottom up.

And so this can be a huge catalyst for recreating what spiritual community means and how people live together and how people share practices and problems, how people face shadows and resolve problems. So one person like this person who’s the whistleblower that you’re describing can be a catalyst for that.

On the other hand, if the response is silence, if the response is denial, if there’s no openness to changing the system, that person can suffer more, can be scapegoated and can really experience more suffering. So each situation I would say is really distinct. And the people who stand up for this need to have a lot of inner strength and not just ego strength, but centeredness, as David said, In pure consciousness so that they have a real deep context for the story that’s unfolding and for the reality that she’s not the victim. That’s not who she is. She’s pure consciousness. So if she acts from the victim only, she’s going to get a certain response, a narrower response. If she acts from this larger state of awareness or stage of awareness, she might get a different response. Does anyone have any other thoughts about that question?

Rebecca        Thank you, Connie. That’s very helpful.

Phil Goldberg  Connie, for everybody, I recently interviewed the CEO of Kripalu and Stephen Cope, the psychologist who was there when all this unfolded. And so I put the link to that interview on my podcast in the chat room if anybody wants to hear their history of it.

Connie Zweig   Great. Lisa?

Lisa                Hi, thank you so much for this talk. Just so wonderful. And my question is not related to the previous question/comment, but this is within the context of what you were covering today. It was about spiritual abuse. But I’m really curious if you talk about in your book or if you could speak to, because I’ve been in a spiritual community where there was all of the things that you listed and I extracted myself out, did all of the shadow work, all of that. I’m in a different community now, completely different, like the whole other exact opposite of what I was in before. So I feel like I have a very, very good understanding of what spiritual abuse looks like, and in a healthy spiritual community.

So what I’m curious about is those instances in which it is a healthy spiritual community, but there might be people within, students, within the community who are going through shadow and they’re projecting onto the teacher. Is there a way to support the process of spiritual awakening, which at some point will probably include some of this spiritual shadow work, right? Like how do we be discerning around that other than like, if you’ve been in a community like I have that had spiritual abuse, and then now I’m in this other one and it’s like, okay, that’s not there. But there’s a person within the community who’s going through just her own shadow right now. And she’s doing a lot of projecting that nobody else is experiencing within the community around the teacher. So yeah, how do we support people in their spiritual awakening and processes? They’re dealing with shadow and there isn’t spiritual abuse. Does that make sense?

Connie Zweig   Yes, it does. Yeah. So this isn’t only about abuse. We could generalize to say this is about loss of faith, spiritual disillusionment. So, you know, for me, I was not spiritually abused. I wouldn’t call it that. But what happened was I faced a lot of hypocrisy and eventually lies. And that for me was too incongruent with the teachings and I and so I had to leave. So it’s a wide range. It doesn’t have to be overt abuse that we’re talking about.

But what I’m hearing you say is that there’s an individual person who’s disrupting the community because of her own level of development. And so maybe she’s imagining that certain things are happening that aren’t actually happening. Or maybe she’s in fear that they will happen. And this is one of the risks of being in groups, you know, that there are people who are less developed than others. And sometimes there are people who are really disturbed and unstable. So there’s no one solution for that. And maybe we could hear from some people on this call who have communities and who have dealt with this. Some communities can build in something like peer counseling, where people can talk in dyads or in small groups with a person who is violating boundaries or being disruptive or causing some kind of chaos because of his or her own emotional turmoil. And so it’s almost like an intervention. You know, we can say, we’d like to talk, we’d like to hear you out. And we’d like you to hear us. And you do a kind of active listening. If there are any more professional psychological people in the group, there might be more of, you know, trying to help this person understand that she may be projecting and that she may be afraid that something is happening that’s not really happening. So some of it is about establishing some kind of communication in the community for this kind of disruptive person.

And, you know, there are unstable people everywhere. And sometimes they need our support, but sometimes they need a more direct, honest approach. And even risking that she may leave, you know, but she probably needs that kind of encounter from someone in the group and maybe someone who has some authority. I hope that’s helpful. Laurin?

Lauren          Hi. This is such a wonderful discussion. So thank you for everyone. And I don’t see Lisa on anymore, but I just had something else to reflect on what she had shared. And just thinking about how having an individual who is in some way projecting onto an entire community, to me it seems like, and I’m hoping you can comment on this, Connie, that it seems like the community actually that is going to be reflecting on and doing their own shadow work around that, you know, instead of, I mean, I don’t know what this individual will do. I don’t know how they will work through their, whatever is going on with them. But it seems like as a community, we would be like, well, how come we are a community that has people like this within it? Or how are we as a community when someone in our community acts like this, you know, and how does it trigger us individually and how do we behave collectively? And that seems like the more, I don’t know, you know, creative and, you know, productive response. 

Connie Zweig   So what’s the question in there? 

Lauren          Oh, no, it’s not a question. It’s a question of, like, I don’t think for me, if I was in that community, it wouldn’t be about the person who is projecting. It would be about, okay, how do her projections land on me as a member of this community? How do her projections impact the way I see her? You know, and so that’s my shadow work that I have to do. And that’s, and so from my perspective, that’s the only power I have in that situation, really, is to continue to reflect on me. And then maybe if there were people in the community who collectively wanted to also do the same thing with me, maybe like what ultimately happened with Kripalu and Zen Center, you know, that we would be doing individual and collective shadow work. 

Connie Zweig   Okay. Thank you. David?

David Beaver   I’ve got a specific question, but to preface it, over the time I sat on the ASI board, I think I was, I think the word would be stunned by the level of whatever you want to call misbehavior among prominent teachers. I had not, although I’ve taught for almost half a century and have been aware of some of the more public high profile examples of that, I was really amazed by the prevalence of these conditions. And it certainly caused me to look with greater scrutiny at my own practice.

Early on, and you know, when I was still reading everything and going everywhere I could find before I found my teachers, I was heavily influenced by Franklin Jones, his writing, his teaching, and a brief period of time with this community in San Francisco. But I found my own teachers in another tradition after that, but I then saw his trajectory towards becoming Adi Da and the high profile experiences there.

So I, again, I saw these as one-offs. And then sitting on ASI, I was stunned by the level of this. I just wanted to mention that my own teachers were, from my point of view, impeccable. The experience I had was incredibly positive, bringing me through the teaching and the experiences and then authorizing me to teach. So I didn’t have that traumatic experience and I had a prototypical happy childhood, I guess you could say. So I didn’t have that. So that’s why I think it’s stunned me so much.

But now the question that I have goes back to the traditions themselves. Almost all of our traditions go back thousands of years and the earliest documents almost all speak of the teacher, the master in these exalted terms and almost suggesting that they are speaking with the voice of God. Many of them do. And I think that that tradition has worked its way into the spiritual communities. I think we’re still dealing with that, even though we don’t know from experience that it doesn’t actually play out that way. So I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

Connie Zweig   Yeah, so the research for this book was very, very disturbing for me. I didn’t realize the scale either of what was happening. And so it became, you know, an effort to understand how this could be, how could this be happening?

And, you know, Ken Wilber’s teachings are very helpful in this way. The difference between states and stages and also the lines of development. Some of you may be familiar with that. So you can be highly developed along the spiritual line and very undeveloped along the moral line or the emotional line or the creative or the cognitive line. Awakening is not global. It doesn’t solve all psychological and emotional problems. And it doesn’t, and, you know, from a psychologist point of view, it doesn’t resolve personality disorders.

And so when I read about, you know, the intensity of some of the abuse by really renowned teachers, I can only conclude that they have severe narcissistic and in some cases sociopathic personality disorders. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t have high spiritual states. And that’s very confusing. And it’s very disheartening, you know, because we want it to do everything. And we begin as young seekers thinking that it will solve every problem and it will lead only to bliss. And so it’s very confusing to discover that this is not the case.

And at the same time, there are teachers with great integrity. And there are teachers with great compassion. And so how do we, given, you know, the gifts of psychology, I know David, this is hard for you. The language is hard for you. But given our insights now from a hundred years of psychology, how can we rethink the teacher-student relationship? The scriptures that wrote about the master-disciple relationship were not in our culture. And so there are cultural issues in these communities now. There are gender issues. You know, there are issues of, like, for example, in Tibetan Buddhism, there’s a teaching called Samaya, which is a vow never to criticize the teacher, never to doubt the teacher. What do we do? What do we do with that? Right?

Given what we know now, how do we begin to reimagine our spiritual lives to include the reality of the human shadow? That’s really my bottom line question. How do we reimagine our spiritual lives given what we know about human nature?

David Beaver   If I might briefly interject, very briefly, it’s interesting you mentioned Ken Wilber because Ken was one of the earliest followers, supporters, and for the longest time, supporters of Franklin Jones in his trajectory towards Adi Da. And so I think it took him a really tough time to go back on that. And by the way, I’ve been, during the whole half century that I’ve taught, I’ve also been a cognitive researcher. So I really appreciate your bringing the brain mind issue into this.

Connie Zweig   Good, thank you. If someone is living in an advanced non-dual state or level, how can they act out the shadow? How can they act out self-destructively or hurtfully to someone else? How can those exist simultaneously?

So one level of it is that you can be very spiritually advanced and at the same time still have shadow material. So there’s shadow material in every chakra. So if you have shadow material in your second chakra, but you’re living up here in the ninth chakra, right? You may act out sexually and really believe that it can’t hurt anyone because it’s the divine moving through you and you’re in spontaneous right action and you’re not in charge. It’s just happening and you’re not identified with it. And so your mind then rationalizes, well, this is good for her. This will help her evolution.

And so this whole kind of complicated event unfurls from that in his mind, in her mind, in this community’s reality, the spiritual rationalizations, the people who defend it, the people who deny it, right? So it’s really tricky.

We could also say that there’s shadow material in the heart chakra. And so someone who’s very, a teacher who’s very narcissistic, hits or kicks or verbally abuses her students because she doesn’t have empathy. She’s not feeling empathy. She’s telling herself that that’s good for them because it comes through her.

So it’s, and there are also cultural differences. You know, the young Kali Rinpoche, the young man who now has the title of the old Kali Rinpoche who died, came out, I forget when it was a year ago or something, and said that all the boys in the Tibetan monasteries are being sexually abused. So then they grow up, they become lamas, they come here and they’re abuse survivors and they start acting out these patterns, but they’re not, they don’t have psychology. They don’t have shadow awareness. They don’t have, and in fact, there was a similar story about some of the zendos in Japan. So it’s a very, so there’s cultural issues, there’s psychological issues, there’s issues in the subtle body or the samskaras, whatever we want to call that.

And there are emotional needs. I think that a lot of teachers feel very isolated. It’s very isolating to carry this idealization from people and have no friends, no colleagues, no one to talk to about it. You certainly can’t go to therapy. So there are a lot of levels for this explanation. And I guess my intention today was just to begin the discussion about this. And I’m really, really grateful that all of you were here and open, and I hope to see you next time. Thank you, Jac. Thank you so much.

Jac O’Keeffe   Thank you, Connie. It was just wonderful. Really so informative on so many levels. Phil, would you like to just add anything before we close up?

Phil Goldberg  I want to express my gratitude to Connie for giving us the time and on a personal note for being my friend all these years.

Connie Zweig   A lot of years.

Phil Goldberg  It’s fun to be co-elders. So thank you. And on behalf of everybody here, I’m sure everybody’s got a lot to think about and take away.

Connie Zweig   Thank you all. And if you want a study group on spiritual shadow work, just shoot me an email. ConnieZweig@gmail.com. Lots of love.

Jac O’Keeffe   Thank you, everybody. Catch you down river. [END]

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