Meditating with the morally compromised

Many spiritual instructors have blind spots; some have done harm. How do we learn from their wisdom without being complicit in their mistakes?

First of all, an extremely warm welcome if you’re new here! I’ve had a steady stream of new subscribers ever since the wonderful

Anne Boyd

, who recommends this stack, went viral with her essay Two Years Ago I Quit My Life. If you’re one of those people, thank you, and I hope you like what you find xxx

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I don’t remember what it was that first drew me to the meditation classes at my local Buddhist centre — how I even heard about them, what prompted my first ever visit, whether I went alone or with a friend. But I do remember the sense of relief, in those early days, whenever I walked through the doors. It was all so tranquil, what with the incense, the fresh flowers, the people padding about in their socks. The meditation instructors were walking adverts for the practice: thoughtful, considered, seemingly untroubled by impatience or anxiety or mental freneticism. Even when it was crowded with people, as it often was, I felt calmer there than almost anywhere else.

I was a fickle meditator and I wasn’t thinking of actually becoming a Buddhist, but it was a comfort to know that the centre was there. I could leave my troubles at the door, and as a result, I started to idealise the whole set-up. It was a purer place than the world outside, I felt — insulated from grubbiness, injustice, hypocrisy. Things were simpler there; people were kinder.

So I was incredibly disappointed the day I happened upon an article in the Guardian that reported widespread sexual misconduct in the Buddhist order of which the centre was a part. Things had improved in recent years, certainly: an internal process of reckoning had been underway for some time, and every centre in the order now had a safeguarding officer. But in the earlier decades of the movement, its late founder — whom the meditation instructors all still spoke about with great affection and respect — had encouraged and presided over a culture of sexual licentiousness that had enabled coercion and abuse. There had been multiple allegations of misconduct against him personally.

The article came out when #MeToo was in full swing, and its author was clearly on the attack, looking for opportunities to root out and expose predatory men. The implication was that the order was no more than a cult, in thrall to its problematic guru. That had never been my experience, but now I started to question myself. Was I being naive? Had I been brainwashed? Was all the pleasantness a ruse to cover something much darker? It all felt tarnished. For months — or maybe it was years — I stopped going there altogether. Eventually I started going back, and I still do on and off, but these days I keep my sceptical hat well within reach.

Yet while it had all come as an unpleasant surprise, it wasn’t the first time I’d been morally disappointed by an apparently promising route into meditation. At around the time I first discovered the Buddhist centre, I also subscribed to a secular meditation app that was starting to get pretty big. I happened to have a colleague whose husband had recently got a job at the offices of this meditation app, and she told me that he loved it, that it was a great place to work. This didn’t surprise me in the least. An office full of regular meditators sounded like professional utopia.

But some time later, after I’d left that job, I heard from a friend who still worked there that the colleague in question had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, only a year or two after the birth of her first child. As if that weren’t enough of a blow, her husband had been let go from his job at the meditation app because he — the father of a toddler and the partner of a cancer patient — had been taking too much time off work. I no longer had a subscription to the app at this point, but I relayed the story to a friend who did, and he cancelled it in disgust.

Over the course of the last month, this now-familiar cycle — meditation honeymoon period, followed by a rude awakening — has repeated itself once again. I’ve discovered a different meditation app, a newer one, that could almost have been designed for me. It walks a similar line to the one I’ve been trying to walk myself since I discovered mindfulness a decade ago: a dogma-free, anti-woo woo, science-meets-spirituality type approach that sees meditation not as a sticking plaster for stress, but a philosophical practice with the potential to alter your understanding of the world.

One morning the other week, I listened to a beautiful talk on the app by its founder. It was about how everything you do, you’ll do one day for the last time, probably without even knowing it. I looked around me and thought: one day I’ll walk through this train station for the last time. Suddenly I noticed the pattern on the floor and a row of lovely green tiles on the wall and wondered why these things were new to me even though I passed by them almost every day. As I walked from the station to work I took in flowers and leaves and people’s shoes and patterns of brickwork with a sudden, acute awareness that it was all finite and transient and incredibly special for being so. I arrived at work feeling calm and happy. Wow, I thought. This app really is great.

And then, that evening, I googled the app’s founder. I’d never heard of him before, but he turns out to be a well-known writer and commentator. One of the things he has written recently is a very inflammatory essay. I read it, and it enraged me. I read it again, but I couldn’t find a way to understand it as anything but apologism for brutal violence and destruction.

I googled some more, and discovered that Mr. App-Founder has some real beef with Islam. He objects to the word ‘Islamophobia’, because he thinks it obscures the difference between anti-Arab racism and intellectual critique of a religious ideology; he claims to be doing the latter, while being very against the former. But to my mind, having read some of the things he has to say about Islam, there is an obvious flaw in his logic. Consequences matter, not just intention. His anti-radical-Islam writings won’t touch Hamas, say, or the authoritarian government of Saudi Arabia, but they might very well empower a bigot to harm a perfectly ordinary Muslim human just trying to go about his or her day. That means his writings have the potential to incite real-world harm. And that, in turn, makes it more than a little ironic that over on his app you can listen to him guide you in a loving-kindness meditation.

None of this changed the fact that I had that very morning heard him impart some simple but powerful wisdom that I hope I remember for a long time. But nor did said wisdom change the fact that I was appalled to learn how he was using his platform elsewhere. I’m still trying to work out how to allow those two truths to coexist.

I’ve written numerous times here about my now decade-long dance with meditation, positing various theories (here, here, here) for why I have so far proved incapable of either fully embracing or fully relinquishing it. But I think these kinds of moral conundrums might just be the biggest barrier I’ve yet encountered. Meditation is rooted in Buddhism, and within that context, one of its core purposes is to develop compassion. So if a meditation teacher’s own capacity for compassion appears in any way compromised, it can be hard to take them at their word. Their ethical slips are liable to make them look like hypocrites. And if I’m taking spiritual guidance from a hypocrite, what does that say about me? Does it make me complicit in their harms? Am I just retreating into my own privilege because those harms don’t directly target me?

I know that if I abandon every meditation aid or community in existence because the people associated with it have moral flaws and blind spots, I’ll never be able to meditate at all. Going in expecting something to be perfect, then giving up on it when I learn that it isn’t, is idealistic and unproductive. The question, partly, is about figuring out where my red lines are, and then how to navigate the thorny space within them. But it’s all complicated further by the fact that these problems are practical, not just theoretical. They have a direct impact on the very act of meditation itself. If the things I know about the person teaching me are making me angry or upset, those feelings themselves can create a serious barrier to meditating in that moment — at least for a novice like me.

I could, of course, give up on meditation teachers and communities altogether, and try to progress on my own. But I know from past attempts that this only works for me for so long. At some point, the solidarity and experience of other meditators becomes invaluable to keeping a practice going. So if I want to continue, I need to find a way to live with the fact that the ethical bar for Buddhists, meditation teachers and spiritual guides generally is sometimes higher than they — as flawed humans — are capable of living up to.

I can think of two other ways to address this problem that stop short of quitting meditation altogether. The first is to examine my own capacity for compassion. No one is without fault, everyone is complicated and contradictory, and numerous things can be true at once. It’s possible to be wise and thoughtful in some areas while also being thoughtless and misguided in others. I know this to be true, so can I find compassion and understanding when I’m presented with evidence of it? Where is the middle ground between internally ‘cancelling’ my meditation teachers and turning a blind eye to instances of genuine harm? Can I learn to see beyond the binary of ‘you are good, therefore I will listen to you’ vs. ‘you are bad, therefore I will not’?

The second, ironically, is inspired by one of the things I’ve heard Mr. Problematic App-Founder say, which is that anything can be an object of mindfulness — breath, bodily sensations, sounds, thoughts, emotions. So it follows that my complicated feelings about the person whose voice is speaking into my ear, telling me how to meditate, are themselves ripe for being meditated upon. What would happen if I turned towards those feelings with curiosity, rather than letting myself get lost in them until I give up and run away?

It’s tbc how well either of these strategies will work in practice, but this time I really would like to find a way through. If you’re a meditator and have grappled with this problem, I would love to hear how you navigate it.

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