[Note: The names of certain individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.]
I once knew a monk, Ajahn Khemaso, who could sit in perfect stillness for hours. Disciplined, warm, respected. Decades of meditation had deepened his capacity for loving-kindness and focus. People trusted him completely.
But he also carried trauma from his years in combat.
When nightmares, panic, and fear began to resurface, he turned to his teacher — Ajahn Khemavaro, a highly regarded master known for his deep realization and insight into emptiness. Students came from around the world to learn from him.
The teacher’s response: “Snap out of it. You know how to meditate.”
Perhaps he meant, “You’ve got this.” But that’s not what landed.
Several months later, while on tudong (a period of wandering meditation practice) in Southeast Asia, Venerable Khemaso left his robes folded neatly in his room with a brief note and climbed out a third-floor window, down the outside of the building and walked until he could send a telegram to his teacher, informing him that he was no longer a monk.
When we spoke a year later, I asked Jeffrey (his name as a layman) why he had left like that. He said, “If I had seen Ajahn Khemavaro, I would have punched him.” The ferocity in his eyes and tone underscored his words — facing his teacher had become too much to manage skillfully.
Six months later, at Jeffrey’s memorial, a woman cried out, “What happened that made him leave like that?” It wasn’t public knowledge. Even in remembrance, the full story remained untold. It was also untold in his memoir, where not a single word about his years as a monk appeared.
Perhaps that silence is the truest reflection of what was missing — not only understanding, but the capacity to bear witness to suffering that didn’t fit the framework.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
How can a teacher with authentic awakening cause so much harm?
My working hypothesis is this: realization and healing are not the same thing. Meditation cultivates awareness and insight, but it doesn’t always address three distinct and often overlapping domains of wounding: trauma, attachment injury, and narcissistic wounding.
1. Trauma: The Body’s Unfinished Story
Trauma is the residue of uncompleted survival responses — what was too much, too fast, or too overwhelming for the nervous system to process. When the system is flooded and outside its window of tolerance, the first thing to go offline is the capacity for observation.
Meditation offers awareness, but trauma repair requires safety, co-regulation, and titration — conditions that help the body complete the responses it couldn’t finish. A trauma-informed perspective recognizes that when someone is dysregulated, meditation alone isn’t accessible or effective. Regulation must come first; awareness can follow. Without this, “just observe” can unintentionally retraumatize rather than heal.
2. Attachment Wounding: The Pain of Disconnection
Attachment wounding arises when early relationships lack consistent safety, attunement, comfort, delight, or encouragement. It’s not about a single event, but an enduring pattern of unmet emotional needs.
What heals attachment wounding is not insight but relationship — experiences of being met, seen, and valued in ways that rewire the nervous system’s expectations about love and safety.
A teacher may have deep realization into emptiness yet still carry attachment wounds. Seeing through the illusion of self doesn’t automatically create emotional attunement. When Khemavaro told Khemaso to “snap out of it,” he wasn’t providing trauma-informed care or the warmth and safety that attachment repair requires. The result was predictably unfortunate.
3. Narcissistic Wounding: The Subtle Defense of Self
Narcissistic wounding, as A.H. Almaas describes, arises from the loss of contact with our essential being — our innate sense of value and authenticity. This disconnection creates a painful emptiness that the personality tries to cover with self-images and external validation. Ordinary narcissism is part of this universal human struggle for self-worth and cohesion, while Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) represents a more entrenched and rigid form of the same wound — far more resistant to awareness and difficult to treat. Even with direct realization, either form of narcissism can persist because it’s woven into the fabric of the personality. Realization transforms awareness — it reveals who we truly are beyond self and story—but it doesn’t automatically rewire the psychological and relational patterns that formed to protect against shame, inadequacy, or rejection.
A teacher might shout daily — morning and night, for months — with no awareness that they’re angry at all. When the anger is named, they may offer only “I didn’t know I was angry,”” with no further investigation. Over twenty years of questions might yield the same response: blank incomprehension. Meanwhile, dissent becomes dangerous, and the community transforms from a sangha of practitioners into a protective circle where loyalty to the teacher supersedes commitment to ethical principles. Safeguarding structures may be subtly — or not so subtly — sabotaged. This isn’t necessarily conscious manipulation. Whether conscious or not, the narcissistic structure operates to protect against the intolerable experience of being wrong or inadequate.
Narcissistic wounds arise when we lose touch with our essential nature and build defenses around the hole. They heal when we develop enough ego strength — often built through therapeutic relationships, attachment repair, or practices that strengthen the sense of self — to turn directly toward the deficient emptiness and sit with it. Not fill it, not avoid it, not spiritually bypass it. Just sit in that unbearable sense of unworthiness until, with time and the right conditions, what feels deficient reveals itself as spacious awareness. The hole becomes openness.
Realization shows us our true nature. But integration requires that we build the capacity to stay present with what we’ve spent a lifetime avoiding — and that building often requires relationship, safety, and support before the direct encounter becomes possible.
Understanding this distinction matters urgently.
When narcissistic wounding goes unrecognized in teachers, genuine realization can coexist with relational harm. The narcissistic structure doesn’t require spiritual justification when it has institutional power. It requires a hierarchy that prioritizes the teacher’s authority, and a community trained to be compliant—to defer, not question, not investigate.
This compliance becomes complicity when people sense something’s wrong but choose protection of the system over inquiry into harm. When no one asks “What were they objecting to?” when someone gets banished, the community has moved from trained obedience to active participation in silencing.
Without awareness of narcissistic wounding, teachers mistake their need for control as appropriate authority. Students’ legitimate concerns get pathologized as attachment or lack of practice. Communities compound this by protecting teachers’ reputations instead of students being harmed, confusing loyalty to the lineage with love.
The consequences are severe. In a recent gathering of spiritual abuse survivors, a concerning pattern emerged: nearly everyone present spoke about experiencing suicidal ideation after their time in community. This isn’t anecdotal — it reflects what happens when people lose their entire spiritual framework, their community, their sense of self, and are told they are the problem. The isolation and self-blame that characterize spiritual abuse create conditions where many survivors struggle to want to continue living.
The pattern is predictable: Unrecognized narcissistic wounding combined with spiritual authority and vulnerable students without accountability systems creates systematic harm that communities rarely name and survivors often don’t survive intact.
But when we recognize that awakening and integration unfold together, humility returns to the center of practice. We learn that enlightenment doesn’t make us immune to our humanity — it invites us to meet it with wisdom, honesty, and care.
Buddhist psychology notes that conceit (māna) — the comparing mind that sustains “I am” — persists until the fourth and final stage of enlightenment. Because narcissistic defenses also function through comparison and protecting self-image, these patterns can persist even after early stages of enlightenment.
A teacher can therefore have genuine realization and still defend against shame or inadequacy. In this light, Khemavaro’s “Snap out of it” might have reflected not cruelty, but discomfort — an inability to admit, “I don’t know how to help.”
Why This Matters
When communities can’t distinguish between insight and these three types of wounding — trauma, attachment injury, and narcissistic defenses — harm becomes predictable.
When traditions and communities grow in trauma-informed, attachment-aware, and narcissism-literate understanding, awakening becomes less compartmentalized and more whole and relational. Teachers, students, and community members alike become more attuned to these dynamics and the kinds of support each requires. Together they can cultivate the humility, safety, and collective wisdom needed to recognize harm, respond skillfully, and foster genuine healing.
In Khemaso’s case, trauma that wasn’t properly supported led to a tragic outcome. In another case, the teacher showed early signs of narcissistic patterning that became more visible years later. Because few in the community understood these dynamics, the result was profound harm.
When attachment wounding overlaps with trauma and narcissistic defenses, the path toward healing becomes more complex. These patterns are remarkably resilient. Without tools specifically designed to heal them, it’s unlikely that defenses formed to protect against unmet needs will simply dissolve.
When attachment wounds remain unaddressed, they shape how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world — and what feels possible in trusting relationships. Even when deep insight and realization are present, integration may still be missing. The result is a gap between awakening and the capacity to live that awakening in relationship.
The Path Forward
Meditation remains a profound vehicle for liberation. Yet in most cases, meditation alone is rarely sufficient to accomplish what trauma repair, attachment repair, and narcissistic healing can do.
Integrated awakening unfolds through:
- Awareness and nervous system regulation
- Insight and secure relational repair
- The humility to say, “I don’t know how to help with this”
When we can face the feeling of deficient emptiness — that gnawing sense of inadequacy or unworthiness — and recognize it as a portal rather than a verdict, spacious awareness becomes accessible. But this recognition itself often requires the support of therapeutic relationship, or teachers who have traversed this journey themselves, not just solitary meditative insight.
A Realistic Hope
The meeting of contemplative practice and psychological insight is still evolving. We’re learning how to bring together the clarity of meditation with the tenderness of human repair.
No single practice, teacher, or tradition can do everything. But when meditation communities embrace trauma-informed wisdom, psychological and relational understanding, awakening becomes not just about seeing clearly; it becomes about living wisely, responding appropriately, and repairing what was once broken.
That, too, is liberation.
