Dating Within Your Spiritual Community

Here is a topic I haven't seen written about much, if at all, although is tangentially related to the teacher sex scandals in the news lately. The topic is dating someone in your sangha or yoga community.

Take this guy, who is dealing with having an ex-girlfriend practicing in the same yoga studio.

So here I am, a grown, tough man, who has avoided going to yoga for days because I don’t want to see her, hear her, or even smell her patchouli.

I feel like she has stolen my refuge (thank goodness for RY!), and taken my one special place I can go and be surrounded by friends. All I can think when she is in class is “You owe me a ton of money” or “You hit me so hard I puked twice,” or worse. I certainly don’t want to dissuade my classmates from befriending her, as I believe (naively) that I somehow brought out the worst in her, and (hopefully) people can change.

Is she ruining my yoga experience? Yes, undoubtedly. Should I just deal with it and move on? Sure. Is it distracting to the point of infuriating when she is in the same class as me? Oh, god. YES.

Now, dude has some issues to sort out. He's pretty wound up and all. Yet, this kind of stuff happens a lot. Spiritual communities are - or would seem to be - one of the perfect places to meet someone you are compatible with. And people do - meet and become couples in these communities - all the time. And they also go through rough patches, and/or break up. Which certainly can make things awkward, if not unbearable.

I have had some conversations with a fellow Zen sangha member about these very issues. His views are fairly cautious about the whole idea of ever getting involved with another sangha member in the first place. He has, for example, a genuine concern that if things go wrong, the person he was dating might leave the community, or even practice all together. You might think he's placing too much emphasis on his potential influence, but what he's worried about actually happened to him once. So, I get it, and such a concern makes some sense, especially given that our primary purpose for being in a sangha is to practice together - not find someone to date.

Yet, I also have sensed in his tone a bit of the mixture of hands off/negative view that seems to play out in many spiritual communities around sexuality, romantic relationships, and their place within a spiritual life. What do I mean by this? Well, specifically the tendency to focus on what goes wrong in these areas, how sexuality and love relationships can be hindrances, and all the ways we get lost in fantasies driven by lust and other forms of desires. Indeed, due to the unfortunate number of Zen teacher scandals with sexual relationships at the center, many sanghas have created detailed documents sussing out some of the myriad of ways things can go wrong, and how members of the community need to act in order to "not go there." The same has started to happen in yoga studios, in response to overly invasive and/or predatory teachers hooking up with students.

Now, I'm fully in support of such policies. And I'm fully in support of anyone practicing in a spiritual community taking a good look at their desires around sex and love relationships, and making efforts to witness, curb, and/or weed out destructive tendencies.

However, I wonder if, in the process of protecting our communities, some of us have gone too far. Or more precisely, if the majority of discussion around sex and love relationships is focused on how they go wrong, then perhaps everything else is being shoved underground.

During a recent class on the third Zen precept, we split up into talking groups based on gender. There was some lively discussion for sure, but I was also struck at a percentage of men in our group that didn't want to talk about sexuality at all, or who were primarily focused on how much they screwed up when it came to working with the precepts and sexuality. My own comments were tinged with that flavor, which later made me pause.

Going back to the original issue, though, unlike my dharma brother, I have never dated anyone in either my Zen sangha or in the yoga communities I have been in. Have certainly thought about it, but have never made the leap. In part, this was due to time and circumstances - being in a relationship already when meeting someone I might otherwise be interested in. However, I also think there's a part of me that fears being part of a mess that spills over into the larger community, and also doesn't want to be seen as one of "those guys" who hits on women in spiritual communities. Because I'm not. And yet, all of that, in some way, seems to be tied to maintaining a certain image within the community - in my case, one that's pretty "clean" if you catch my drift.

Do people who are church or mosque goers think like this? Somehow, I think not as much. There seems to be a point of dating and/or marrying someone within your religion that doesn't play as strong, for better and for worst, amongst Western Buddhists and yoga students. And perhaps the general lack of attention and care for families and children in particular amongst these communities plays a role here.

A Methodist meeting another Methodist at their church would then, if they have children, naturally would bring those children to Sunday School classes. And if they are committed members of that community, they might have been in counsel with the Pastor from early on in their relationship together.

This scenario, in it's totality, seems so much less common amongst Western Buddhist and yoga communities. Even in my own Zen community, which has long had an active program for children, and tends to support families more so than the average American Zen center, parts of the above example don't seem to play out. People tend to come already matched, and with children, to the sangha. The idea that a couple would meet in the community, develop together, start a family, and then have those children grow up in the sangha is kind of foreign. I can think of a few examples that almost fit that bill, but they are exceptions.

And then there's the flip side of this issue - how to handle break ups with a community. I'm not convinced anyone - traditional church all the way to radical Zen sangha - has figured out some great way of talking about such things. Or of how to help people consider such things as dealing with community gossiping or being ex's and also members of the same community at the same time. And I can imagine there's plenty of repression to be had in your average church, mosque, or synagogue.

Yet, I wonder if the way in which things have been compartmentalized - that we tend to "do our spiritual thing" in one place - with a group of adults - and do most everything else in some other set of places - I wonder if this hasn't created a curious divide around what tend to be our most intimate relationships. That people who do date end up dating another member of their sangha or yoga community do so in a kind of hushed, privatized way. Or that some of us simply don't consider others in these places, thinking it's "wrong" somehow, instead of something to consider more carefully perhaps, given the group dynamics that can be involved. And others, who have dated and then break up, end up either leaving the community out of guilt, shame, or a feeling of having a lack of support.

Lot's of questions in my mind. Not a hell of a lot of answers. How about you? What has your experience been? Have you dating someone in your Buddhist or yoga community? Or have you seen such relationships develop and/or break up within your community?

"Cult of Positivity"

Over at the blog Recovering Yogi is an excellent post by Kimberly Johnson about the excessive positivity found in many yoga communities. It's also a problem in Buddhist sanghas, and other spiritual groups, and one I have written about before.

That secret code is the code of constant positivity within the yoga community.

In the yoga world, you are not supposed to disagree—even though everybody does—and you certainly are not supposed to be disagreeable. Of course, most people have strong opinions about which kind of yoga is better (their kind) and what the other schools don’t understand, because if they did, clearly they would convert to the right school. The right thing, in yoga, is always the thing that you do. But most people don’t express it openly. Better to feign peaceful coexistence and call it “acceptance.”

However, I have found both in myself and in my peers a lack of courage to engage in truthful dialogue around teaching philosophy and practice. I didn’t have the nerve to tell my friend that she was giving the same dharma talk in every class and it was getting old. No one had the nerve to tell the male teacher to stop serial-dating his students. There is this gaping hole of communication, as if egos are so fragile and every class so personal and precious that there is no room for dialogue.

The feelings of guilt and betrayal I felt when exposing my truth in my last Recovering Yogi article were the tiny echoes of a victim/abuser relationship, where the victim feels protective of the abuser, says things to defend the abuser, and is afraid to speak truthfully about the experience publicly.

What I like about Kimberly's post is that she show how a failure to disagree, debate, and offer criticism when appropriate actually weakens the whole project. When people choose to smooth over destructive behavior by teachers or fellow students, it makes it less likely that anyone in the community will benefit from the teachings and practices. When getting along is privileged over getting at the truth, everyone misses out.

I witnessed an interesting exchange a few weeks between a male yoga teacher and two female yoga students. The teacher was expressing caution around doing women inversions while on their period, and cited a long history of teachers agreeing on this point. One woman said "Almost all of those teachers were men. How long have women been practicing yoga?" This was followed by another woman who basically disagreed with the male teacher, citing potential health benefits and personal narratives of her students and friends. In fact, at one point during the discussion she said, point blank, "I'm just expressing my disagreement with you, is that ok?"

I didn't get the sense that the male teacher leading the class was comfortable with this kind of disagreement. Perhaps he worried about loosing control of the class. Perhaps, there was some bit of sexism going on. But I mostly think it was about maintaining that harmonious yoga environment which people tend to expect to be there. As someone who really appreciates debates and discussions of different views, even if I'm not directly involved, the way things played out was a disappointment, and it's something I have repeatedly experienced in spiritual community settings. Things start to get juicy and the "happy face" is held up by leaders and/or students to get things back to the safe "norm."

So, perhaps the next time a debate or disagreement appears in your sangha or yoga class, instead of being part of the effort to get rid of it, be a part of the effort to explore it, examine it, and respect it as part of the process.