Moloch, Mara, and other spirits want one to get caught up in righteous anger, which makes it enormously hard to understand what happened. I've waiting more than a year since leaving to write anything public even remotely critical, and I haven't even referred to them by name.
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As well, the person who finally did publicly criticize the org is probably the least well suited of all the former trainees I'm aware of, and she seems to be trying to destroy it rather than help anyone
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Similarly to qc's experience it felt and still mostly feels impossible to have my own thoughts about the monastery because of the shape of the discourse around it, internally and externally (see this whole thread)
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2. brent, the guy who ran the mini-cult i was in inside the rationalists, got kicked out of the rationality community, but it wasn't because of the cult. it was because a sexual assault accusation was levied against him anonymously in a medium post
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I'll get to some specifics: while I was there I developed extremely intense misophonia, now even the sight of someone chewing, even from behind without any audible sound, arouses boiling rage. Usually I just dissociate *hard* when this happens.
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at OAK i developed a persistent tension in my left shoulder that, at OAK, only occurred when i was sitting, and now flares up in response to certain kinds of stress. still there after 2 years :/ doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as what you're describing but... another data pt
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Another part of this question is contextualizing all of this re intensive monastic practice. My understanding, across traditions, is that monastic training is very destabilizing for almost everyone for periods of months or years at the beginning,
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but is regarded as totally worth it by ppl who stick it out. There's some legitimate criticism to be made of that entire swath of orientations to practice (mark is obviously exemplary of this), but this is a criticism _from within the discipline_, so to speak,
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and probably variously illegible and misleading to outsiders. Hence a lot of my reticence to talk about this in public. I've heard tell of some actual zen teachers in america privately criticizing the head teacher where I trained, but this seems at least partially political,
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and in any case actually mostly doesn't address a lot of the difficulties I had, which seem to be substantially endemic to monastic practice whatsoever (not just zen, not just buddhism, etc.)
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There's some good reasons why they don't want to start shit, at least for the sake of optics for western buddhism. At least one consequence of this, tho, is that I'm left to bewilderedly do my own sensemaking, get triggered like mad, etc etc etc
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sorry to hear that :/ fwiw, hoping the appropriate kind of help presents itself to you somehow 🙏