Time to Heal

Holly Gayley

How do we grow our capacity to respond in moments of crisis?

A certain paralysis can come with shock and, for me, a muteness. Not knowing what to say in a confrontation or attack, until months or years later. Too many scrambled words. Keeping the most difficult feelings to myself, fragmenting them off and sealing them away.

There’s a volcano inside that I’ve never let erupt.

When my guru slipped his hand under my skirt one summer evening, no one was looking. Or rather, they had turned away, busying themselves with cleaning up since the party was over. I was a Naropa student at the time, cooking for my teacher when he came to Boulder or during summers at the mountain center. It happened after the drunken reverie had quieted. I froze and dissociated. A kind of phowa: the ejection of consciousness when it’s no longer safe.

I had no response, other than silence.

I learned to be silent from my mother, who asked me to keep my sister’s mental illness a secret. During high school, my sister raged through the house unmedicated, sometimes chasing and grabbing me, pulling at my hair or digging her nails into my arms, accusing me of ruining her life. It was not until she ran out of the house one day screaming that she was finally hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mute, I sank into quiet depths, retreated into books and nature.

I am committed to speak, now.

I came out as a Buddhist and a survivor at the same time. It was messy, but at least I had tenure. The forum was an online webinar on “Power, Leadership, and Empowerment” in the series The Future of American Buddhism (April 2022). I had twelve minutes to summarize four years of learnings from a sexual abuse crisis in my spiritual community. On social media, the complaint was: what took you so long? I wanted to say, fear of this: the public take down, cancel culture.

A reply I came up with a year later:

@ Fred Coulson, I also remember the old days at TBRC fondly. If you want to be an ally to survivors, please don’t mansplain. Let people listen and come to their own conclusions. When you focus on a woman’s character rather than what she says, you enact an old patriarchal trick. It’s a form of silencing. Re: my feminist credentials, have you read anything I’ve written in the last ten years?

In her right hand, she holds a hooked knife.

Throughout the crisis, I’ve witnessed anyone who spoke publicly, on any side of the issue, taken down on social media. The need for accountability in the community and beyond remains palpable. Tragically, it may never be satisfied, because the guru disappeared into the mist. Or, at least, a new level of mystification: a no-questions-asked style of Vajrayana. The male leadership dissolved, and the only ones standing in Boulder were the women, mops in hand, cleaning up the mess.

In Chöd practice, I feed them bone broth and blood smoothies.

What it took to heal: a year in therapy, a women’s circle, weekly calls between the acharyas who resigned together, Tara and moonlight tonglen, a loving partner, yoga nidra, long hikes, two years in a trauma-training, deep dives with friends, an experimental writing group, meditation, a cabin in the mountains, taking adversity as path, my triad sisters, pilates, and a hot tub.

Does the healing ever end?

Holly Gayley, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a scholar and translator of contemporary Buddhist literature in Tibet and Himalaya. Her research areas include gender and sexuality in Buddhist tantra, literature by and about Tibetan and Himalayan women, ethical reform in contemporary Tibet, and theorizing translation, both literary and cultural, in the transmission of Buddhist teachings to North America. Gayley is author of Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (2016), translator of Inseparable Across Lifetimes: The Lives and Love Letters of the Buddhist Visionaries Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tāre Lhamo (2019), and editor of Voices from Larung Gar: Shaping Tibetan Buddhism for the Twenty-First Century (2021).