An Open Letter to Ken McLeod

Ken,

I have not written this letter before because, until now, I had hoped that there was still a glimmer of dignity in you that would enable you to respond my grief, but your silence and your embarrassing legal threats against Grace Schireson and Adam Tebbe have shown me otherwise.  Though I’ve now lost all hope, I remain grateful for your finally waking me up to what is most important to you as a teacher: saving face. 

Before I started my blog, you ignored me; maybe you were thinking that, like an old stain, I would eventually fade away.  After I started my blog, you could no longer ignore me, but you still refused to acknowledge me.  You dodged and stonewalled and then, when my blog received public attention, you had your attorney (student? Board Secretary?) Robert Conrad step up efforts to protect your reputation and keep up appearances while you vacationed abroad and wrote vacuous newsletters to your loyal following back home.  You carefully avoided mention of any public “scandal” and reported instead on your adventures sipping local wine and savouring Buddhist poetry while, over here, the ugly struggle continued.  Did it ever once occur to you to do something helpful for someone other than yourself during this time?  In a way, it is a saving grace that my hope was finally snuffed out by the evidence of your callous indifference, because now I am at liberty to tell you how I really feel. 

This is my grievance procedure.

I have heard that you have shared emails I wrote over the past three years—a few, short emails in which I sought to reassure you that I was well and still cared for you.  Perhaps you shared these emails to discredit me and divert attention away from your own behavior.  If you know anything about trauma, Ken, and I think you do, inconsistent emotional reactions shouldn’t surprise you.  Yet they seem to.  Despite your being able to write that it takes five years for a student to get over a relationship with her teacher, you seem unable to conceive or care that this might have been the case for me.  Have you ever wondered what goes on in those five years?  Have you ever asked yourself what a student might be feeling?  I notice you have never written about those details.  Well, I can tell you: lots of confusion, lots of contradictory thoughts and emotions, a stream of pain that seeps in as one gradually, very gradually, thaws and starts to feel again.  Those emails I wrote were written because I still had some lingering hope, a deluded hope that was not ready to admit the full force of your deception. 

For the first few months after you dropped me, I expected you to reappear.  I was not yet able to conceive that you could be motivated by something other than kindness and compassion.  I could not believe that you would allow a student to fall in love with you, stand by as she risked everything to be with you and then, after spending a couple of nights with her, decide to take off and leave her naked in your dust.  It was just too painful to consider that I might have been used and discarded, just like that, and by someone to whom I’d entrusted myself completely.  So, as the first few months went by, I convinced myself that you were waiting for the air to clear before resuming contact with me, that you wanted to leave the student-teacher thing far behind so that we could be together again on equal footing.  When that stopped making sense, I believed that your sudden withdrawal was a way of continuing to care for me as a teacher, showing me “there is nothing to hold on to”, a killer lesson but intended for my own good.  I found every reason not to believe that you were escaping the mess you’d helped make of my life and were leaving me to clean it up alone.

By a weird fluke, I met a woman (W.) who had also been a student of yours.  W. was very troubled about her relationship to you and, when I asked her about the details, I discovered that you had pressed her, a married woman, for intimacy during a retreat.  You had asked W. to sleep with you and, when she refused, you dropped her as a student and never spoke to her again.  She had been studying with you several years and was shocked and devastated by your behavior.  But the thing that was most shocking and devastating to us both was that you were seducing us at the same time.  Actually, you had already seduced me, and I was in the midst of separating from my husband in order to meet you after that very same retreat.   It was a life-changing moment for me but apparently it was just the same old same old for you.  W. also told me that she was not the only one struggling with her feelings for you at the retreat; another woman was noticeably fawning over you as well.  That woman drove you to and from the retreat.  I had asked you once who that other woman was, and you had told me she was “just another student”.  You used to use that same expression when receiving messages from students while we were skyping.  I wonder now if that is how you referred to me behind my back: “just another student”.

Once we got over the initial shock, W. and I had a few more enlightening conversations.  She told me about so-called “energy practices”.  She was in fact the one to explain to me what you were doing with me in your hotel room in Montreal.  What for me was a frustrating exploration of desire, using a practice that I did not understand or enjoy, was for you, apparently, what?  Using sexual energy to power your spiritual practice?  Was that what that was?  She told me that you had several other partners, female students, with whom you also practiced these techniques.  She told me that I actually met one of them when you and I were in Toronto.  You introduced me to her yourself at Mindcamp.  Remember?  She gave me a funny look. In retrospect, I understand what it meant.  It was pity.  For there I was thinking that you and I were about to embark on a spiritual journey together, a journey I believed in and left my marriage for, while you apparently were seeing me as a fresh supply of energy.

I wrote to you once that I had forgiven you for getting “cold feet”.  That you didn’t love me, or fell out of love with me, was something I could have lived with.  But this was not just love gone sour.  You were my teacher and you deliberately concealed your involvement with other women students, led me on, and then abandoned me.  Love me?  You didn’t give a shit about me.  My yoga teacher, a student of Hart Lazer, told me that you told Hart over lunch in Montreal “she’s leaving her husband but it’s not going to work out between us”.  That night you met me in your hotel room.   Why would you say that to him and not to me?  If you had doubts, you might have had the decency to share them with me.  I was in the midst of leaving my marriage for you.  Have you no idea what another human being might be going through in such a situation and how vital that piece of information would be?

It took me about two years to begin to speak openly about my experience.  That is when I spoke to another student who put me in touch with the Unfettered Mind Board President, your friend Stephanie.  At the time, I approached her out of concern for you and other students.  I had not yet fully connected with my own anger because to do so, Ken, I would have had to connect with the utter vanity of what I had done to my life to be with you, the absurdity of having left a good man for someone who would treat me this way, the heartache of witnessing my ex-husband’s struggle to let me go so I could pursue what he and I both thought was my “spiritual path”, the pain of facing my children’s lack of understanding and my own inability to explain my actions to them.  I had imagined that Stephanie, as your friend and as someone who already knew about us, would be sympathetic to my distress and sensitive to my concerns about the patterns of behaviour that put you at risk of causing more harm to yourself and your students.  Instead, she hit me with red tape and asked me for a “written statement”.  After a few more fruitless exchanges, I could see this was not going anywhere.

About a year later, I spoke to an authorized Unfettered Mind teacher, someone who knows you well and who knew about our relationship.  He was kind and sympathetic.  But then he made a remark that helped me connect with one of the last blind spots I had not yet faced into.  When I told him of my disappointment in you, he shrugged and said, as if to explain your behavior, “he’s a monk”.  I nodded in wistful agreement but, as the words sunk in, I began to reject them like a failed transplant.  Then, within days, I found release from one of my most stubbornly held delusions: that everyone, including me, should make exceptions for your spiritual genius and emotional naiveté.  I think, by the way, that you probably share the same delusion, which is why you’ve been unable to meet me face-to-face like another human being. 

That was the beginning of the undoing of the last strands of hope.  I was inspired to rekindle my campaign for a grievance process.  You know the rest. 

At the retreat where I first met you, you said the door to practice should carry a sign above it warning students who cross its threshold: “abandon hope all ye who enter here”, Dante’s inscription above the portal to hell. 

It’s been hell, Ken.  Thanks for the warning.