In the Summer 2018 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Lama Willa Miller offers both her painful firsthand account of sexual misconduct by a guru and insight for fellow survivors and communities. Photo-performances by Cecilia Paredes. Victim. Survivor. Consort. Partner. One of “those women.” I stare at these identities on the page, and one by one I try [...]
About Lama Willa B. Miller
5 Buddhist Practices to Face the Truth of Climate Change and Take Action
Climate change can feel so immense that it hurts just to think about. Lama Willa Miller offers five meditations to help bring the truth of climate change into your awareness and lay the ground for a skillful response. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria have come and gone, leaving hundreds dead. We’re left facing a dire reality: we live on a warming planet. Homes blown [...]
Advice for Women in a Secret Sexual Relationship with Their Buddhist Teacher
Lama Willa Miller offers nine pieces of advice for women who find themselves in secret relationships with their teachers. Like so many women, I found myself hashtagging #MeToo during October's viral social media campaign. I wish also that I could go back and be an older, wiser sister to my 22-year-old self. But in lieu of that, I offer these suggestions to women (and [...]
How You Can Support a Victim of Clergy Sexual Misconduct
Lama Willa Miller offers suggestions on how to support a survivor of sexual misconduct by a Buddhist teacher. Survivors of sexual misconduct are human beings. They are not just human beings who could have been you. They are human beings who are just like you. What I mean is that they have the same emotions, same vulnerabilities, and same fears. However, they have had a [...]
Meditation Only Goes So Far
If you want to connect with the open, spacious quality of mind, says Lama Willa Miller, at some point you have to stop trying to meditate. One hot summer evening several years ago, I found myself listening to a teaching in a meditation hall in upstate New York, an activity that had become far too rare at that point in my life. A hush came over the crowd as the diminutive [...]
Meet a Teacher: Willa Miller
I grew up in a blended counterculture family in Berkeley, California, in the 1970s. My mother was a cell biologist with spiritual leanings, and my father was an English professor and organic farmer. In 1985, I went on a college exchange program in Nepal, where I lived in a two-room house with a family of six Tibetans who spoke no English. After returning to the States, I [...]
Reviews: Investigating the Subtle Body
Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West edited by Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston Routledge, 2013, 282 pages; $155 Training the Wisdom Body: Buddhist Yogic Exercise by Rose Taylor Goldfield Shambhala Publications, 2013, 192 pages; $16.95 Recently, while attending a public teaching by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche at Wellesley College, I was [...]
