I'm writing this to capture my thoughts about the NKT and my experiences at one of it's centres. I have been connected to the centre since University and it was my second practical connection with Buddha-dharma, the first being an Insight meditation retreat in Sarnath led by Christopher Titmuss. It is the only practice I have taken on board deeply, having practised it for 12 years. Prior to it, I was doing Breathing meditation and loving-kindness practices, inspired mainly by the retreat in India and A Path with Heart.
When I first went to a general programme (GP) class my impressions were not good because I was not interested in the deities and gods that I saw depicted all over the leaflets and books they had out on the tables. However, the teachings were extremely clear and logical in a way that deeply appealed to me. To this day listening to a good NKT teacher tends to set me on the edge of my seat.
Having engaged in retreat in India, I soon visited the centre for what I assumed was their sitting session (as it was the most regular occurrence in the schedule) but Wishfulfilling Jewel is actually the Chanted Sadhana practice of Je Tsongkhapa and Dorje Shugden. I was a little discombobulated by the second part of the Sadhana as I had just finished reading the Dalai Lama's Autobiography, at the end of which, he warns against the Dorje Shugden practice and attempts to give some explanation of his position against it. I was somewhat troubled, but I noticed that after attending the puja, my meditations were more powerful. This made me override my misgivings somewhat and I continued to attend classes and started regular attendance at puja. Pretty soon I was told about Foundation Programme (FP) and I started attending on a Sunday Morning and enjoyed it immensely. I started on the second chapter of Joyful Path which is the second part of the Lamrim cycle. I'm aware that if we'd started with reliance on the Spiritual Guide, I probably would have left at that time as I still very much had my guard up.
When I was due to leave University and move back home, I was offered a place to live at the centre as a resident. The day before this happened I had just finished reading the Alchemist and the main message I had taken away from that book was the slightly scary "follow the omens in your life or they will cease to appear and your life will become meaningless". So I immediately agreed on the spot, then spent a few weeks worrying about what I had agreed to!
My experience of the centre was mainly very good, I was a little taken aback by some of the ways the teacher treated some people and I was intimidated by his presence and struggled to connect with him, apart from one occasion when he gave me a real gift of listening and I was moved to tears by the way he listened to me and the love he communicated whilst doing so; this experience is one of the things that got me interested in learning to be a counsellor. It was not long before I was invited to teach a GP class of my own. I agreed with a lot of misgivings about my ability. However, it turned out that teaching as a path was very powerful for me, it took a while but once I figured out how to set my intention properly before I began, I would say it enabled me to help a lot of people and I continued to teach for a couple of years. Then I had a hiatus from teaching and living at the centre for three years when I moved out with a girlfriend; a painful misadventure.
My way out of the relationship was to move back into the centre. By this time I was on my third NKT teacher who encouraged me a lot and allowed me to take on a lot of responsibilities. Having been away for so long I was enthusiastic and for a while taught two GPs, held a directorship and worked as Education Programme Co-ordinator at the centre. I quit my job and took on part-time work so I could give more time to the centre. I gave up one of the GPs but kept my other roles. Being so close to the goings on, I became very aware of the difficulties the teacher faced internally and externally. She and I did not have the most healthy of relationships, but I know that she cared for me. However, I repeatedly found myself and others in situations that seemed to be a product of the teacher's delusions and mistakes. It irks me to this day that, in the five years I was EPC we were not once visited by anyone in a senior position who was interested in the way things were being run or what was happening on a day to day basis. I was also studying counselling and the disparity in the ways the BACP requires and supports ethical conduct of counsellors vs the lack of support and supervision of NKT teachers was quite distressing. Steve at NKT central is a really great guy, but the support is reactive, not proactive as I believe it needs to be, after all, the NKT is caring for people's spiritual lives.
Things continued to trouble me and I found that there was noone I could talk to about it. It was so hard, I saw people being mistreated and misused in strange and difficult situations, our karma seemed to be that we were dealing with a lot of (conventional) mental health issues. At one point, a depression-prone resident was asked to leave the centre by text message, I was, and am, horrified by that. There are a number of horrible and difficult things I could detail, but its not worth it. I became aware through contact with people at festivals and online that burnout and mismanagement were not uncommon at other small centres and even some of the big ones.
The central tension I experienced was between my immense appreciation and connection to the teachings and the dysfunctional and problematic life I experienced at the centre. My approach to solving this was to try to fix things at the centre. I was only a Director at this point, I was instrumental in changing the contracts for residents to be more inline with the NKT's standard contracts. It is indicative of the lack of oversight the NKT head office has of its child centres that we were operating without any formal rules or the proper residential agreements for probably ten or more years. I'm still proud that my partner and I were able to put helpful processes and agreements in place in collaboration with head office for new residents that had a major impact on the atmosphere and quality of life within the centre. By this stage, things were still not ideal. The community was healthier, but the residents were not integrated and working well together. I wanted to solve these problems I was aware of until the centre felt whole. By now we were on our fourth teacher and she and I have an uneasy relationship (I can be a little outspoken, and I think she is wary of my influence). At one point she asked me to enlist the rest of the directors to find a new Admin director after we'd lost the fourth AD in my time being there. Having seen the difficulties previous ADs had faced and the amount of skill required to do that job well, the directors struggled to identify anyone in our community that could carry the role. The resident teacher wanted a person who was very new to the NKT and was to my mind in the romantic first stage of practice. I couldn't bear to see this person thrown to the wolves in the way we were being asked to. We asked my partner, a very mature Vipassana practitioner to step in and handle some of the responsibilities, she thrived in the role having shadowed and supported the previous two ADs at the centre. However, her involvement worried the RT I think because my partner was not practising Kadam Dharma and therefore not allowed to take on the kind of role we were asking her to. I was excluded from the meetings due to the obvious conflict of interest (which I had blindly brought onto myself). My relationship with the teacher from this episode deteriorated further and I stepped down as Director. With no influence on the path taken, a new AD was brought on whom I felt we were setting up to fail. I was so uncomfortable with what was happening that I stepped down and moved out. I did everything I practically could to improve things.
I reconnected deeply with the Kadampa teachings this year, culminating in the summer festival highest yoga tantra empowerments, which were the most powerful and moving I've ever experienced. I was lit up with faith and an intense connection to the tradition and teachings. However, since then I have had an equal and opposite experience. I realised that most of the people who have been in the NKT for a while are operating at a distance. That in a sense they are all survivors, who learned to maintain their spiritual life by not being too involved in the tradition. Simultaneously, I became aware through STTP teachings that there has been a concern within Tibetan Buddhism and Kadam Buddhism in particular, that we avoid the "dangerous heresy" of Hashang Mahayana's concept-less meditation. My suspicion is that this concern is really at the heart of the Dorje Shugden controversy. That we are seeing the tension between Chinese and Indian Buddhism that manifested in Tibet before the great debate was won, now manifesting on the streets of Europe and the US. This is not to say that I think that the Dalai Lama is right to act in the way that he has, he's over-reacting massively but I think he's basically right in his assessment of Gelug's having a superior and exclusive mindset. His best argument is actually hard to find but paraphrasing it goes something like this "Are you saying that before Je Rinpoche there were no enlightened beings in Tibet? This is nonsense so lets have none of this talk". It seems there is a long-standing suspicion that the Nyingmapa teachings are Hashang Dharma in disguise. These two insights have left me wiser, but less grounded in practice. I need to find my way.
