The Two Very Big Problems with ISTA

Although the curriculum of the International School of Temple Arts is not without its virtues, the entire ISTA culture has been compromised by shadows around two of its core teachings.

I love ISTA.

The so-called “International School of Temple Arts,” despite the fact that it isn’t much of a school and that it has very little to do with either temples or the arts, has captured my heart. Mostly, it’s the people within the group — some of my best friends are ISTA devotees, and every time I go to an ISTA event, I make new and awesome connections. And I should also add, here at the beginning, that I can think of multiple ISTA facilitators whose behaviors do not conform to the general culture I outline below — they’re the exceptions to the rule. Thus, I hope it’s clear that nothing that I write here is intended as a personal attack against anyone.

I must emphasize this point because, sadly, I have seen much of the contemporary discourse about ISTA focus on people — usually on facilitators who are perceived as abusing their authority in relationship to students. This post is completely agnostic on such questions; I wasn’t there, I don’t have the evidence, so I don’t know, in any specific case, what happened between any ISTA facilitator and student. My personal suspicion, forged in the fires of my past experience as a prosecutor and investigator, is that some of these claims are probably merited and that others are probably baseless; but I have no way of knowing which is which.

This post focuses instead on the curriculum taught at ISTA, which has rapidly become one of the most popular sacred sexuality movements in the world today, as well as the culture which has been shaped by that curriculum. It’s a subject which should concern us all, given that Western culture has been limping along, almost entirely stripped of its sacred sexuality traditions, for centuries — and that therefore, so-called “Neotantra” movements like ISTA (or Charles Muir’s Source Tantra, which inspired ISTA’s creation) represent the closest thing we’ve got to a seriously viable restoration of our cultural birthright. Cracks in the foundations of these movements threaten the broader, more general acceptance of the union of spirit and sex in the Western mind at large; therefore, we have a moral duty to repair them.

And when it comes to ISTA, I have in mind two cracks so vast, they might more properly be called canyons.

The Seven Tools of Emotional Dysfunction

I’ve been to 14 weeks of ISTA in total, so I know that when a new participant shows up at a “Level 1” training within the organization, one of the first teachings they will learn is the so-called “Seven Tools of Emotional Release.” In my experience, the facilitators can never agree on exactly how many there are, but in any case the number actually taught is never actually seven. At the time, I laughed this discrepancy off as harmless ineptitude, but now I clearly see what should have been a red flag.

What are these “tools”? For the uninitiated, they amount to a sustained period of high-intensity, negatively-valenced core affect, with an empty genuflection to the somatic-embodied psychology movement in the form of the mantra, “breath, sound, movement.” Basically, you’re encouraged to scream and hit things, continually and without a break, for up to an hour.

Here’s a telling fact: though I’m good friends with at least a dozen ISTA facilitators, I don’t know a single one who incorporates these tools into their daily practice. I mean, have you tried? These techniques are emotionally and physically exhausting; every single person I’ve ever met who has attempted to cultivate a daily habit of these exercises has given up after a while — including ISTA faculty.

The narrative around these “tools,” which I’ve heard time and again, is that they’re “clearing.” One of the facilitators will rise from the couch of power to tell some sort of story about how they used to be emotionally blocked — but then they found these tools, and by using them every day they cleared those blockages from their personal emotional body. This then cleared their vessel for transpersonal work — using the same tools, so they claim, they then cleared the blockages in their family’s emotional body, then friends, then all society, then all of Earth and cosmos.

That’s quintuple-distilled poppycock, and a blatant lie to boot.

When one studies the neuroscience underlying such practices, the picture which emerges could hardly be more different; and it just so happens that the social results predicted by such neuroscience correspond precisely to the social dynamics that one finds in the core of ISTA today — namely, stunted emotional maturation and rampant addiction to drama.

Let’s review the evidence backing up my claims. First, I should explain what I mean by “core affect,” a technical term of art that I used above. According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, core affect is an essential component of the body-mind connection which is partly regulated by the feelings and expression of emotion. But the interplays between body and mind through core affect can be incomprehensibly complex, through simultaneous “mind maps” and “body loops” through which mind affects body, body affects mind, mind affects mind and so on. The upshot is that the subtle interplays of emotion cannot be neatly streamlined into a schema of “express and release.” Many times, expression actually impedes release.

These important neurological findings have inevitably cast considerable shade on the conceptual premises behind the Gestalt-style psychologies which lie deep in the roots of ISTA’s pedagogical tree. When serious scholars like Carol Tavris or George Lakoff take close looks at such philosophies, they tend to find them baseless at best, insidious at worst. Tavris’s scholarly work on the science of anger, for example, shows that Gestalt philosophies encouraging participants to “express and release” don’t work at all; instead, what is assumed to be a healthy venting of pent-up tension tends only to increase feelings of rage without releasing anything.

The picture turns even grimmer when one considers Lakoff’s work, and especially Moral Politics. That important and underread book details the devastating political effects of a culture of anger and gives the lie to the entire idea behind ISTA Level 1; if the premises behind the “seven tools” and similar Gestalt-style emotional practices had any validity behind them, then one would expect to see a healthy decrease in anger levels after supposedly cathartic political rallies in which populist demagogues whip up the fervor of their supporters by stoking the expression of their rage.

Of course, what we actually see in real life is exactly the opposite.

If you’ve been to ISTA, you might be asking yourself why, if these tools are actually so bad, do they seem to work — at least temporarily? Once again, neuroscience has the answer, in the form of that special class of happy chemicals called endorphins. These naturally produced organic chemicals, similar in structure to morphine and heroin, make you feel really good! They are a large component of the famous “runner’s high,” which athletes get when they push themselves to find their physical limits; and any sustained use of the “emotional release tools,” which essentially amount to high-intensity bodily exercise, will produce them as well. So even though “running the tools” does nothing to actually improve emotional health, they do have the effect of producing a nice chemical reward for the brain of the participant, which will then seek ways to justify that reward by telling a story that what just happened was good for you.

And yes, for the astute who just read that last sentence — what I’m describing is called addiction.

There’s another important effect of endorphins, other than their addictive qualities, which becomes relevant to this question: their neurochemical effect of dulling sensation. It is no coincidence that synthetic analogues of these chemicals, like the aforementioned morphine and heroin, were marketed by pharmaceutical companies as painkillers — that’s precisely what they do best! Knowing this quality of this class of endogenous chemicals, we should not be at all surprised to discover that people who practice the “tools of emotional release” feel as if they’ve released emotion when, in fact, they haven’t: their body, in its chemical adaptations to the extreme stresses these tools force it to endure, releases the very same endorphins which are known to reduce sensation. And sensation, as we know, is connected to emotion through core affect. So to sum up: the “release” in the “emotional release tools” is a chemical release, not an emotional one.

So what happens when an entire global organization, complete with its own internal culture, is created with such faulty tools incorporated into its DNA? The prediction, from a neuroscientific point of view, could hardly be simpler: drama, drama, drama. When such unhealthy tools are held up as a standard within a group, then the loudest, most aggrieved and most narcissistic members can be expected to rise to the top. Emotional health becomes performative; performance becomes the standard of authority. Add in the addictive component, and what you’ve got is an entire culture of drama addiction.

Of course, such practices are also physically unsustainable as a daily practice, as I mentioned above. This inevitably leads to a hypocritical culture in which the message is “do as I say, but not as I do.” Which happens to be the perfect segue into the discussion of the other massive elephant in the middle of the ISTA circle.

Tantra, Sutra and Consent

To the best of my knowledge, ISTA has never officially claimed to be a school of Tantra — it seems that they prefer to follow the lead of their founder, Baba Dez Nichols, in calling it a school of the “temple arts” instead. I’ve spoken to Dez about this matter, and it’s clear from our conversations that he intended an inclusive definition, in recognition that countless cultures have their own sacred sexuality traditions, of which Tantra is only one.

Yet, despite these word games, ISTA faculty very much do dabble in Tantra — and unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, they do so in pretty much the worst way that I can possibly imagine.

To understand what I mean, we first must get into the subject of what Tantra really is. Here, Westerners have been criminally underserved by a glut of so-called “Tantra” movements which have practically nothing in common with the historical tantra practiced in, say, 11th century Kashmir. Though a litany of their catabolic sins could make for an enlightening post all its own, for purposes of this essay I’ll focus only on one — a really, really big one: sutra.

Let me put the matter as plainly as I can: without sutra, there is no tantra.

The way my crazy, autistic mind works, the easiest way for me to understand a new topic is usually through its etymology; and in the case of the beautiful Sanskrit word sutra, etymology does not disappoint. Sutra is related, through its Latin cognate cousins, to suture — literally, the thread which, through its weaving, closes a gap. In medical terminology, that gap might be a wound or incision in the skin or viscera; but in spiritual terms, it’s the gap between mundane and divine, between humans and our gods. Sutras therefore serve a similar function as religion [literally, “a great binding/sewing back together,” from Latin liga, the same root as in ligament].

Tantra cannot truly be understood in the absence of sutra. The Sanskrit word also has its own Latin cognates (admittedly somewhat more phonetically distant) like tapestry, evoking the fullness and texture of life lived when all sutric threads come together in an interwoven whole. The gap is closed, fully, between heaven and earth — because of dedication to the sutras. From such a place (and assuming that the Tantra one practices is non-dual Shaivism and not, say, dualistic Sangkye), all is permitted, all is divine, all is one. But historically, no student was allowed to get there without first mastering the sutras on a deep, deep level.

Enter ISTA.

Whether consciously or not, the ISTA Level 1 curriculum attempts to sell participants a greatly and recklessly accelerated tantric path. Instead of the historically slow spiritual journey, in which students were required to study sutra and master their impulses and desires for decades before ever setting foot in the tantric temple, ISTA implicitly promises a rapid shortcut to all the many benefits of the old way in only a week — for those few who are privileged enough, that is, to afford the hefty price tag.

What could possibly go wrong?

The soft, rank underbelly of such a truncated philosophy readily becomes exposed when one closely examines ISTA’s teachings on consent. Anyone who’s followed the relevant news knows that ISTA’s governance has recently promulgated a new policy for how to handle allegations of consent violations; and as a personal friend of many of the ISTA lead faculty, my belief is that their efforts in this area are quite sincere. That’s why it pains me to write that, despite such sincerity, their efforts will do nothing at all to address the real root of the problem.

The root, of course, is that the entire ISTA faculty has drunk the Kool-Aid on important questions about the relationship between tantra and sutra. They have all tacitly agreed, through the ISTA culture, to ignore the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of sages and their teachings. Why? Because it gets them laid. By selling a cheap, molded-plastic, Made-in-China version of Tantra, they have accumulated vast stores of money, power and — above all — sex to themselves. Any doubts about the morality of such a culture which may be voiced — and I know that they do get voiced, from time to time — will be quickly steamrolled by the momentum of aggregated primal drives and desires. When consent problems arise, as they do constantly within ISTA, the organizational narrative kicks into high gear to frame each incident about some particular person — either that Bad Facilitator who must be punished, or that Bad Participant who cannot prevent their trauma bond from projecting their daddy issues, or whatever the cockamamie du jour happens to be. The rhetorical-political effect of all of these discourses, which few ever seem to point out, is to prevent any discussion of the real issue. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get an organization to understand something when both the salaries and the sex lives of its members depend on their lack of understanding.

Whether consciously or otherwise, the “group field” created by an ISTA Level 1 course seems as if it were deliberately designed to override or overwhelm the sexual consent of participants. The “emotional release tools,” which only have the effect of dulling the perception of feelings and do not do anything to actually release emotion, are taught to participants as a tool that they should use every day of the workshop, especially — and this is the most critical point — after the faculty “open the field” to allow or even encourage sexual interactions between teachers and students. This means that even after several days of lectures and practica on consent — which creates the ritual appearance of a consent culture — the students are actually disempowered from exercising their consent. The root of consent, lest we forget, is sentere — as in sense. Literally, “consent” means “sensing together” — all parties feeling into what is true for them in that moment. So much of our discourse around the topic seems to confuse this feeling aspect of consent with its verbal communication.

By now, you might already suspect the punch line: in a group field which has been drenched in sense-numbing endorphins, participants are expected to exercise their sovereign consent while the faculty go cruising. But because sensing is the very essence of consent, the “group field” actively works against the consent culture which is presented in a boring lecture which no one remembers anyway.

Most telling of all is this: while I’ve heard many versions of the tedious “consent talk” which ISTA promotes through its Level 1 curriculum, and while I know from firsthand experience that Level 1 assistants are required to practice it in all of their erotic interactions with other participants, I have never once, in all of my weeks of ISTA, seen a facilitator practice the consent talk in the same, orthodox way that they teach it (but to be fair, in speaking with friends within ISTA, I’ve heard second-hand that they actually have observed some faculty members doing this, while admitting that most of them do not). The reason for this is simple. The consent talk (whether going by the nonsensical acronym “RBDSM” or the hilariously tone-deaf “SPREAD”) is a long, mental drag that only tends to kill the erotic mood, while an insouciant ignorance of that same talk sends a powerful sexy signal that the facilitator has transcended all such drivel — that, in other words, he lives by tantra and not sutra. It’s a powerfully seductive subtext, suggesting that the shortcut to enlightenment is found through the facilitator’s genitals. Meanwhile, all other participants are expected to adhere to sutra — that is, to the eros-killing consent talk — in a blatant double standard which instantly makes the facilitators the most erotically attractive bodies in the room.

If this be Tantra, then it is Tantra at its most puerile.

Toward a Better Lineage

I have decided to break my public silence on these topics only after exhausting every internal channel within ISTA that I could find. Using every personal connection I have to the ISTA lead circle, I have tried, and tried, and tried, and tried, and tried to get the message through to anyone who will listen. A few did — or at least, they politely pretended to. But after more than a year of trying to blow the whistle from the inside, my conscience finally compels me to go public with what I know.

My hope, in all of this, is that we’ll get a better ISTA curriculum. For that to happen, the culture of scapegoating must change. We must shift the public narrative from who-did-what-to-whom (although such inquiries will always remain valid and important, when sincerely held) and toward the real, fundamental issue. And I’m sorry to report that, when it comes to the Level 1 curriculum, the rot reaches down to the roots.

ISTA has the potential to be a great force for good. For it to get there, it must take a long look at its emotional and sexual shadows. Once that’s done, the hard work of repairing its systemic, structural and cultural issues can begin.

ISTA — I’m ready to begin when you are.