(00:04):
So I realized that when all of this stuff was happening in our tradition as Vajrayana Buddhists, our community fell here and it was such a great loss for a lot of us. A lot of people left and are not going to come back because of all of the stuff that came forth. But I wasn't able to leave. I think that I saw too much value and I know people like Matthew Remsky will say, "Well, I don't care who gets hurt. I don't care who is abused. It's called I Got Mine-ism.... As long as I get the blessings, it doesn't matter who we have to step on because it's all the ends justify the means. If we abuse small children, but we can uphold monasteries, then that's good. If we can 'extract essences' and elixirs from young children, if we can have power and control our students and force them to commit, then it's all good."

(01:18):
So these things that a lot of people felt that were wrong in our tradition, the covert child abuse, the exploitation of students financially and sexually, people left. I guess the people that stay, I don't really know how they reconcile it or we. It's like, I guess we either have to ignore it, just say human beings are human beings or boys will be boys and just deny it or ignore it. I don't really know. I mean, I've always thought that we had to talk about problems and in a forthright way and bring things to the surface and then we can access them to learn, grow and heal, but we don't really have that tradition. But I had spent a lot of time over these years since the #metoo movement trying to parse out in some type of cognitive dissonance around what am I supposed to do?

(02:21):
Do I leave and just hang the whole thing up? Something I've been involved with when I was 19. All of my friends, people on retreats, people have been at my wedding, lots of lovers and people I respect and built my life around. How can I just walk away? I mean, I know how it feels to think about leaving a community or like people who have been in a cult. I actually sought a religious trauma therapist here in Boulder and she said that, "You know what? I hate to tell you, if people come from heavy handed religions or cults, the likelihood that they go back is actually really high."  I think that comes to primarily sunk cost fallacy, which is you invested so much time and friendships, sometimes even your primary family, like say you're in Scientology and your husband and daughter are there and they have a tenant that you're not allowed to speak to these suppressive people and so you would lose your family.

(03:23):
So you just bite the bullet. You know there's something afoul, but you just shut up and go with the flow because of the emotional and social pressure and the time invested. So I kind of get that, but that wasn't exactly why I chose to stay in the tradition despite all of the stuff that happened.

(03:42):
What I did is since I'm a writer, I've always been a writer ever since I was like 15 or 14, is I just created a blog and just journaled about everything I experienced and all of my devotion for my teachers and the practices and my friends and sanghas and the magical experiences I had when I lived in Nepal and India~ and then appreciation for that, profound unwavering appreciation. But at the same time being kind of like a very verbal 'mouth' reflecting some of the voices of survivors.  I think that the reason I was such a verbal person over the years is because I couldn't stand the heartbreak of thinking that I was involved with the tradition that hurt people behind the scenes and coming from a dysfunctional family of origin, I couldn't stand the notion of bullies and like people hurting people and keeping it secret.

(04:46):
So I actually thought that a good approach would be to talk verbally about these things. We're not really allowed to. We have these vows that we're not allowed to talk about stuff, especially if it's "impure," but it didn't work out well for the Catholics to keep stuff silent. It wound up fracturing the foundation and I think it really injured the tradition all the years and decades of silencing of corruption and abuse of children. So I think likewise, we have that same kind of stuff.  I'm like, it boggles the mind as to why none of us really want to clean up this stuff. It's either kind of you're with us or against us. It's like you're a good angel, the archangel of samaya keeping or you're a bad demon that like speaks out against the problems and you need to be shunned and kicked out outside of the mandala.

(05:42):
Is there another way? Isn't there another way? My heart felt request for all these years being such a mouth and sounding just like a real heavy handed person was pleading that we would have transparency around some of these issues that could be improved, namely the command and control model, the child abuse, the exploitation of students, the conflation of the Samaya Vow into ownership rather than it being to one's own mind nature as was expressed during the third turning. It just turned into this big institutional power grab. It doesn't feel right to me. So I have a different [understanding], and it was explained to me differently. I understand the root downfalls extremely well, but I also feel that if they're used in a way that is to create harm, control, exploitation and cover things like non-consensual sex, which is rape with female students and/or children, or if children in the monasteries are being raped every night, these things we have got to talk about.

(06:54):
I'm so sorry to hurt anyone or to offend anyone. I mean, it's just, what are we supposed to do?

(07:04):
I can't just turn a blind eye and walk away. I wish I could, but it's like having seen what you've seen and know what you know, I don't know why more of us with all the vows that we have taken to benefit the world, to not harm, to have ethics, to live a wholesome life, why would we be doing unethical things? That can't be in the name of Tantra or Vajrayana. It can't be in the name of secret conduct. We can't have extract the essences of Kumari little girls and hurt them because the girls grow up want to commit suicide and cut themselves. Then it becomes this tradition of like structural violence where I know what it's like to grow up with child abuse and I've done everything in my power through therapy and going very deep to not become an abuser in my adult life.

(08:01):
I'm proud that I did not. But when you have children that are taken from their families and monasteries and physically and sexually abused, they're going to grow up to become perpetrators. So it's a tradition of perpetuating dysfunctionality and abuse. I know a lot of people, my friends have come into the Dharma and they came from unsavory pasts and/or child abuse like I did. You kind of have two choices. You either become healed and you get help for that or you become a perpetrator.  All of these methods and my belief in human goodness in the human heart, I don't believe people want or really get off on continuing to be perpetrators and upholding unhealthy things. I think somewhere along the line, human beings in their heart of hearts when they're alone with themselves at night, they regret having harmed children in the way that they were harmed.

(09:07):
I believe we can do better and I believe we are better. I just think we have to create a situation where we bring transparency to these problems so that we can learn, grow, heal and change. You just can't have sworn secrecy and loyalty because that kind of stuff is like the mafioso ... I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's called Omertà, ometerra or something like that where you've got to kiss the ring and you're sworn to loyalty because people are doing criminal stuff behind the scenes. You only have to have loyalty and silence and secrecy and secret conduct when you're doing shit that you shouldn't be doing. I don't care what type of tantalizing tantras say that children are some type of elixir. They're not- and it's hands off. We cannot destroy lives, period. I don't think the people that have done this should go to jail or I just think there should be like a truth and reconciliation since the abuse in these communities is part of the culture and it's structural violence and it's so worldwide and for such a long period of time that I don't think that there's any way ... It's not any one person's fault.

(10:20):
It's like a collective, almost like war crimes. It's like when there's so many people participating in this. I spoke to my husband, I said, "Why don't my friends care more?" All these stories have come out around child abuse and pedophilia and the monasteries, and that's my religion. How am I supposed to reconcile that? He says, "Well, they like it. They don't want to change." I said, "It hurts me when you say that. " He says, "What you don't understand is they think that they have some type of spiritual evolution that gives them permission to abuse children." The fodder that is going on with the kids in the monasteries are imperative for upholding them. But I just said, "You know what? I don't believe it. I don't believe that anyone in their right mind wants to hurt a child, physically abuse them or sexually abuse them." Somewhere, I guess me as an adult survivor of child abuse, I don't think adults want to be doing that.

(11:27):
I think if they are violent or if they are perpetrators, there's just something gone wrong in the mechanism through their development or their compulsion that is unresolved, that it's a therapeutic issue that needs social support and investment in therapy and time and healing to undo. It's a wound, it's generational harm. So that's how I feel and that's what I've come to in all these years of being a Buddhist and being involved in the tradition that basically has fallen apart, but I don't want it to fall apart because even though it's sort of predicated on the backs of these fundamentally unhealthy things like command and control and offering of children to the monasteries where it is very clearly recorded that they are abused and then the adults grow up to become perpetrators and it's a cycle, my heart really believes in what is better in us and that we don't want to do that.

(12:37):
I guess maybe I'm speaking from my own wounded healer, like my own inner child that longs for human beings to be better than they are and believes that we want to be, that we've just sort of taken a wrong turn somewhere and that the heart has gotten convoluted and shut down, but I never lose faith in its capacity to become bright again and to shine light on places that are the darkest and most buried things that are not talked about. I mean, with all of the stuff with Jeffrey Epstein, I think that the problem with child abuse, pedophilia, covert corruption in organizations and cultures is way more ubiquitous than we ever knew. I'm so glad that there's the possibility to bring it to the surface because we have got to talk about this stuff in order to heal it. There's no possibility that we can heal it as long as it stays and remains buried and underground.

(13:44):
That's what it is to bring light to something. So I'm hoping that this collective consciousness that we're all sharing right now, we're going to care enough and become really Buddhist and really take on ethics and precepts and not harm children and not allow them to be harmed in monasteries and lay communities. If anyone has taken on for whatever reason, that tendency to want to abuse children as an adult perpetrator, that I would pray, not for legal recourse, but for therapy and for help so that they would not abuse someone as they were abused because I know what it's like to be abused. I would rather sever a limb than ever do that to a child.  I believe others somewhere through all the dark and the muck and the compulsions and the delusions and the wrong views and the religious tenets and all this kind of rash of shit bullshit that people don't want to do that.

(14:50):
It just has to be that they don't want to do that.  I pray that what is unwholesome in the cultural aspects of our tradition someday be healed so that I can take refuge in it and devote my life to it in good conscience, that I can really make prostrations and with a white kata of knowing that the tradition is pure, not that it's got blood on its hands. So that's why I was such a bitch all these years and wrote all these blogs. I wasn't trying to be a hellion. I wasn't trying to hurt people and take them down, even though it seemed like I was being really like aggressive and confrontational, but it was kind of like a bow and arrow with flowers, like wanting to pierce through so that we can save it and preserve it because it was precious. It would be sad if we lost Vajrayana Buddhism to this world.

(16:02):
It has methods and a power and efficacy.  I think Dzongzar at once said that "it's the best thing to happen on this planet."  I actually agree with that one statement. I don't agree with the lot of what he says, but I agree with that one statement that it would be such a great loss to our world if the whole tradition wanes, but it cannot endure and have such corruption in terms of how students and children and women are treated. So there's no way we can "root downfall, pure perception," all that stuff away. It's got to change. People are collectively too aware of that now. So, I call for a global truth and justice, a truth and reconciliation and a restorative justice campaign where anyone that has committed these crimes or been the victim of these crimes, because I believe they're kind of one and the same, can come forth and be waived and have immunity as long as there's this correction of the community and this new healthiness and firm mandate that our tradition does not hurt women, students, or children anymore, and that the monasteries become safe places.

(17:39):
I don't even know if it's healthy to be giving children to the monasteries at such a young age. They're so vulnerable. Maybe we should start at like 16 and we shouldn't do like permanent monastic celibacy vows. Maybe we should do them in like one week blocks or something, just to have it be like a practice that you're doing for like a month. Then you don't get into situations where people take lifetime ordinations that they cannot fulfill, but you would do it for shorter blocks of time and follow the Vinaya and do the precepts, something in smaller amounts that you can actually manage and then accumulate the merit for just doing a short time and have that experience of celibacy and non-harming. But to have like a lifetime thing, I don't even know anyone in these days that I've ever heard of that really, truly upholds their precepts in a way that respects the tradition.

(18:39):
So those days might be over now and when we don't uphold that, then it leads to scandal and covering and the secrecy and the whole nine yards. So there's a lot that can be done and we can learn, grow and change. We have a system of internal questioning like the Buddha wanted. It never was about only hardcore Bible thumper or Orthodox doctrine. It is this way. These are the precepts. These are the vows. It's not a closed, locked system of ironclad orthodoxy. It's an open, ever changing, living question that can be malleable through time and through culture. This culture does not tolerate the things of the past. So out of tremendous love and tremendous devotion for this tradition, I pray that the things that arose in the past couple of years be talked about and be healed and may these communities become safe places for women and students and children.

(19:46):
I believe that some reform should happen and I will always continue to work for that and I will always have faith in our collective goodness, our collective conscience. I really would hope to form a community that is truly worthy of reverence and refuge.