(Note: the following applies if you are someone who is known to your friends, your family and your coworkers as kind, steady and reliable.
You are someone whose emotions fall within normal limits. As in you can cope with frustration or bereavement without damaging your or other people's possessions, you don't damage yourself or others in serious ways, you can, despite stress and sadness, show up and meet your work responsibilities and don't need to use excessive quantities of food, booze, recreational drugs or crazy activities to cope with stress, either.
If you are a steady person as described above and you dumped or disrespected by a guru, yoga teacher or lama,
and you then are sweetly told your sadness is evidence of your own ego, and that you must learn detachment and non clinging -- Corboy advises that you do not buy this.
Here is my morning rant about the abuses of "detachment" when used against us by flakes in the yoga/dharma world.
Dumped by My Guru
[
theyogalunchbox.co.nz]
Be cautious if you decide to do yoga. It isnt the yoga; it is the social milieu.
All too often the focus on 'detachment' is abused in these ways:
* Persons who are powerholders and who are immature at relationships feel entitled via 'detachment' to discard students with no more concern than one feels when jettisoning a toenail clipping. Detachment is NO excuse to pick up and drop disciples and students as though they are toys for the child-guru to play with.
* "Detachment" does not invalidate a student's valid human hurt when he or she is treated not as a person, but used and discarded as a object.
Immature persons tend to shift from seeming affection to cold disdain -- or abruptly disappear and cease to return texts, emails or phone calls.
This sudden, abrupt shift is not "skillful means." It is not "crazy wisdom" and it is not a "teaching lesson."
This is the tip off that the person is, at bottom, lacking in adult ability to modulate mood and emotion, unable to bear the difficulty of negotiating a gradual break in a relationship in such a way as to respect your personhood and your dignity.
To justify this in the name of 'detachment' is as untrue as it is cruel. In the yoga world and dharma lite scene too many children in teacher's bodies get away with it by invoking detachment.
Worse, this abrupt rejection may re-enact trauma one has incurred at a young age, when one's **age appropriate** emotional needs were spurned. When a childish guru treats your heart as a toy and throws you aside, then claims you are selfish to feel hurt -- this re-enacts trauma you've not healed from.
And this takes place in the context of yoga/dharma teaching -- a context where one dares to trust and hope one's heart will be respected, not toyed with.
In the yoga social milieu, 'detachment' is easily exploited by immature childish persons who are unqualified to have a teaching relationship. Such persons are also unfit to have erotic relationships with adults, and should, in an ideal world, not become parents, either.
The problem is that children in adult bodies can be quite charming and charismatic -- precisely because they are unburdened by conscience, and have a child's playfulness and lightness. If one examines their behavior carefully, one may recognize other instances of unreliability, aka "flakiness" -- such
as coming late to lessons, coming unprepared for lessons and lectures, asking in cute or pathetic ways for students to take care of their needs, (bring meals, laundry, service the car, saying "But I never said I was consistent, etc)
Another tip off: children in adult bodies find all sorts of ways to laugh away their lapses and fuck ups. They get the rest of you to laugh with them. Often someone who tries to call them on their shit will be made the butt of the unfunny humor.
Too many of these types become gurus, teachers, etc. That accounts for the very many harm reports that have been published on this message board in the past 12 years. Characters like this sense social scenes in which they can charm and distract others into excusing their misbehavior; the yoga and guru scene, with its tendency to invoke "detachment" is one such venue.
Dont let a child in adult's body who just happens to be called 'guru' or 'Yoga teacher' exploit 'detachment' as a way to scam you to distrust your valid
hurt and anguish at being used as an object.
That isn't yoga. It is anti -yoga. You will become yet more fractured inside.
No amount of bliss can compensate for this.
The yoga social scene and dharma lite social scene are full of this type of scam.
It benefits immature types who want to toy with people and dont want to face the risk of being called out on their exploitation.
The image of God playing (leela) with the universe and with all of us in it can also be exploited to justify this type of shabby behavior.
IMO, I dont want a God who uses us as toys. A child doesnt see toys as persons, but merely as extensions of self. The child will throw toys at the wall or into a corner when bored and when a new toy is proffered.
A child in a guru's body does the same use and discard to students.
You have a right to your hurt. Your pain, your anger, is your truth.
You are a person, a living breathing person
affected by human relationships.
To be scammed out of trusting your true emotions is the worst con of all. And it will bring no lasting peace.
At the very worst, disciples and students who have been hurt and then tricked ot use 'detachment' to disown their hurt will be very likely to shame newly harmed students to distrust their own pain.
That is how this toxic 'detachment' ideology (aka 'Its a teaching lesson') is
perpetuated from one cohort of students to the next.
The only beneficiaries are the people using teachers who dont want to be bothered with tiresome human emotions.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2015 11:56PM by corboy.