Thank you for sharing. Your experience and words ring very true to my personal experience at Shambhala. Especially your message about how Shambhala didn’t allow room for flaws and failures. Looking back on my experience, I can safely say there existed a culture of "good and bad." The striving to be validated by their standards you mention was very real for me and I bet for many people there. For teachings that preached "non judgementalness" I found it ironic how rigid the mentality in my sangha was. I always felt self conscious around my sangha. I felt I was looked down by other sangha members if it appeared I wasn't being mindful enough etc.

It's going to take ma while to truly digest your post and understand it. But I think you write about not being able to pursue the path and integrate the teachings into your own life. I found that Shambhala handicapped me a bit in my own life. I don't think it equipped me to function normally at work or even interact with people outside of Shambhala in healthy or effective ways. I found the teachings to look down on others who weren't on the path calling it the "setting-sun world" (?). This sort of judgement on others and their lives creates a sort of godliness and "better than you" attitude among students. I love watching TV at the end of a long day. Whose to say that's "bad"? A Teacher once told us that watching Tv or reading are mindless activies that should be avoided and that others who do this are not as wakeful as we are. Looking back with some distance from the teachings, I think this sort of extreme view is really unhealthy. I'm actually in shock at some of the memories I have and just how completely broken these teachings are.

I found a sort of therapeutic outlet at Shambhala. I think other people do to. Someone once called it "group therapy." In retrospect, I think this is a very scary part of Shambhala because there is no one leading these teachings and discussion groups who is a trained license therapist. Therapists in my state have to go through intense schooling and exams to work with clients. No one I met at Shambhala is qualified to lead these discussion groups where people are oversharing about really intense things they are going through in their lives. I found it very inappropriate how some of these experiences were handled.

It saddens me now how many people I met at Shambhala that should be in REAL therapy. A lot of people I met at Shambhala were dealing with bad abuse backgrounds and mental health issues. In my experience, Shambhala actually made my mental health and behaviour more disoriented. I went into Shambhala originally to experiment with meditation and got sucked into the whole ordeal. I enjoyed the community I found and found the meditation practice to be calming and relaxing. I think Shambhala exploits meditation and the vulnerability this practice creates. It's a path and community that is very easy to get sucked into. The teachings about basic goodness and creating an enlightened society touched my heart and seemed innocent. But looking back, I felt like in practice these values were not practiced among the people I met at the center.