Testimonials

I’ve known the leader of the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE), Teal Scott — who goes by the name “Soryu” — for over fourteen years. I first met him when I was 21 and he became my meditation teacher. At the time, I was an idealistic college student studying environmental science at a liberal arts school. His spiritual framing — that deep meditation could help avert existential threats like nuclear war or climate change — was compelling. I wanted to be part of something meaningful, something that could help the world. Eventually, I went to live at his monastery. I stayed for the better part of two years, devoted to the practice and the vision. At first, I believed MAPLE was a noble attempt to update and modernize monastic training for a world in crisis. But what unfolded changed my life — and ultimately shattered my trust.
During my time there, I had aspirations to deepen my practice by training at a traditional Zen temple in Japan with Soryu’s supposed teacher, Shodo Harada Roshi. Soryu tried to subtly undermine this. Before I left for a retreat with Harada Roshi in the U.S., he took me skiing alone — an unusual gesture for someone in his position. During this outing, he casually instructed me to tell Harada Roshi that MAPLE was “Shinzen’s monastery,” not his. It was a soft, manipulative suggestion, delivered in a way that was difficult to challenge but profoundly disorienting. I didn’t understand at the time why I was being told to lie to his teacher.
At the retreat, the truth came crashing down. Longtime students of Harada Roshi laughed when I said Soryu was running a monastery. “He’s not teaching, is he?” they asked, incredulous. I was crushed. Multiple fully-sanctioned American Zen masters — including Chozen Bays Roshi, Mitra Bishop Roshi, Sozui Sensei, and DaiChi Roshi — independently told me that Soryu had never been authorized to teach or run a center.
When I returned to MAPLE, I confronted him. “You told me to say it was Shinzen’s monastery — but it’s not — it’s yours,” I said. He offered no real response. No accountability. No remorse. Just denial. It became readily apparent that my inquiry threatened Soryu’s narrative and control over the organization and group; he used the ski trip in an attempt to reassert that control by pressuring me to mislead the Zen community he was a part of and the teacher who oversaw him. It was an exploitation of the trust and admiration I had for him as my teacher.
At 25, I had no frame of reference for what a healthy monastery should look like. I trusted the structure I was in. Looking back, I see now how thoroughly I was indoctrinated — encouraged to surrender my will over those years at his center, in the name of spiritual growth.
Many years later, I ran into Soryu again — not at a monastery, but at a Lakota ceremony I’ve attended annually. I watched, disturbed, as he repeated the same behaviors that raised red flags over a decade ago. This past year, I witnessed him isolating a young woman — the daughter of Lakota Sundance’s founders — while others were tearing down the ceremony space. He pulled her aside and said, “Your parents are good people, but it’s time to break away from them.” She told me in tears that he similarly pressured her, suggesting she abandon her aspirations to become a nurse, and instead come to MAPLE: “Most people don’t like it at first, but they learn to love it,” he said. She was considering going. Until I spoke with her parents and warned them. This wasn’t just troubling — it was textbook grooming. Watching him target another vulnerable young person compelled me to leave my own testimony online ten years after I left his community in confusion.
Sharing this testimony and seeing the parallels between this MAPLE/Soryu and the characteristics that define high-control group and cults have given me the long-sought-after relief and reassurance I have been seeking. I feel less crazy and it has helped me recoup my own self confidence and belief in my own experience. I am hopeful that sharing my experience at MAPLE will help others protect themselves from what this place has to offer.

Aaron’s Testimonial

How I Ended Up at MAPLE

I was a resident at the Monastic Academy from March through December of 2020. Leaving college, I was dedicated to practicing meditation as deeply as I could while continuing to build Dharma Gates, a nonprofit I founded as a senior at Wesleyan University. There were few places in the country where I could work on Dharma Gates and practice meditation in an intensive setting. MAPLE offered me a position living at their center in Vermont and participating in their training program while engaging in my own work. The total cost of the year-long residency would be $4,000. It was an incredibly generous offer, the result of an apparently deep value alignment between our organizations which shared a goal of making intensive meditation practice accessible to more people. I arrived in March of 2020 just a few days before the COVID lockdown.

What I Experienced

In summary, the first few months at MAPLE were really wonderful. I was supported to sit intensive retreats with other young people similarly dedicated to practice. I had good conditions to work. While the world outside was reeling from the COVID lockdown, I was in a strong, apparently loving community. Things began to shift around September. I began experiencing escalating, seemingly arbitrary panic. Jolts of terror and feelings of imminent death out of nowhere. This gradually escalated until, during one panic attack, I asked another resident to bring me to the hospital. They found nothing amiss. I thought something was wrong with my heart.

I went to the doctor to get a chest monitor which I wore for 48 hours to test me for arrhythmia (all the while I was still on the training schedule at MAPLE.) They documented more anxiety – a max heart rate of 161 during another panic attack – but no arrhythmia. I went to the hospital again a few days later. Gradually, I stopped being able to sleep. There were some nights where I would fall asleep fighting panic, have nightmares of being shot, tortured, or drowned for a few hours, wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 and battle panic for another hour before going to the Zendo to try to meditate. All the while I had no meetings with Soryu to discuss the situation. I was being supported by two junior residents who largely had no idea what to do with me. One had been there about a year. The other I believe for three years.

I made a third trip to the hospital in December of 2020. The following week, I could barely stay in the room with Soryu without having a panic attack and could no longer stay on schedule. Throughout this entire time, based on the guidance of the teachers there, I thought my experience was “stuff coming up” – repressed memories or experiences that needed to be purified through the training. I remember standing up during a talk Soryu was giving to residents because I was having heart palpitations. He asked “are you literally dying?” The implication being that I should not attend to what was happening unless my life was on the line. This was the culture there.

During my final few days, everything was a haze. I remember feeling close to psychosis – like I was reaching a kind of breaking point in my mind. I had a conversation with my mom in which she reminded me of other spiritual teachers I had worked with in the past, that I could always come home, that there were people who loved me, and I didn’t have to be there. I felt something in my mind snap after that. Some deeply repressed part recognized that what was happening was deeply wrong. I decided to leave. I remember asking another resident to take me to the bus station and said “they would see if it was possible,” at which point I had this sense of feeling trapped. Those last hours, I remember the other residents starting to look like demons.

They did drop me at a car rental the next day. I made it half-way to a friend’s house before calling 911 and having my vitals checked. I called 911 or was taken to the hospital four more times between January and April of 2021- always a sense of overwhelming, imminent death. Usually I felt like I was having a stroke or heart attack and would be dragged to hell by demons that were surrounding me.

Recovery took months — I worked with a Buddhist-trained Chinese medicine doctor, began a daily qi gong practice, found a new therapist, and eventually returned to intensive silent retreat with other teachers and communities. By May, my level of panic had largely subsidized, but the feeling of a kind of darkness I was carrying from my time at MAPLE took 2-3 years of spiritual practice to fully resolve.

I have heard people argue that this kind of thing can happen when you meditate deeply. It is not a completely safe practice. At this point, to those people, it is clear that they simply do not understand what I’ve experienced or what I saw – and understood – to be true about that ecosystem. I gave myself completely to Soryu’s method and saw where it leads – and it’s not to liberation. Since leaving MAPLE, I’ve spent about a year of my life in silent retreat in the Zen and Theravada Buddhist traditions, including five month-long retreats, periods of intensive practice with minimal sleep, and completed Ngondro in the Nyingma tradition – another few thousand hours of practice – without any similar experiences to what happened to me at MAPLE. This was not a “hazard of deep practice.”

What I Witnessed:

Initially, I did not blame MAPLE for the experience I had had. But in a healthy meditation center, experiences like mine should be extremely rare. And the obvious question arose as to whether MAPLE was a harmful community – was this happening for others? If it was, how many? I began talking to other past residents and found that there was a long string of past participants that felt deeply hurt, confused, or disoriented by their experiences at MAPLE or their branch centers. Many had put MAPLE out of their mind and life as much as they could after their experience. Many had tried to put MAPLE out of their minds entirely. Others had brought feedback to the organization, but were met so poorly that engaging caused further pain, and they eventually gave up. During my nine months in residence, I witnessed roughly five to ten people enter states of severe distress — dissociation, uncontrollable crying, wild oscillations in behavior — before leaving in bewilderment. Three left the training entirely during my time there. One person planned to sneak out in the middle of the night. This is not a rate of harm consistent with a healthy or competent contemplative environment.

Over the months and years after leaving, many of the things I witnessed during my residency at MAPLE began to take on a very different tone. I am going to share some of them here. My only justification for staying as long as I did is that abusive communities have a way of conditioning you into things slowly which makes it feel normal and that sometimes we will ignore reality if we want something to be true. MAPLE tells a story that speaks to a certain kind of existential terror about the climate crisis and the state of our world and it provides a certain kind of answer. It’s rare to find such a coherent answer, and sometimes if we want an answer badly enough, we can overlook logical inconsistencies used to arrive there. Coming out of college in a state of despair about the climate and the world, I wanted to be involved with something special that was going to be truly beneficial.

Lack of Credentials:

Soryu packages the activities at the Monastic Academy as “monastic training” and pulls heavily from the structure of the Rinzai Zen Buddhist Monastery where he trained in Japan. The first sentence of the Atlantic feature on MAPLE describes Soryu as “ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition,” and the “founder” of a “monastery.’ I personally do not know whether Soryu is still ordained in the Rinzai Zen tradition. He may be. But there is some context missing in the article’s description of Soryu. In the tradition of Zen in which Soryu trained, a person is not empowered to represent or pass on the teachings of that tradition in any way unless they have what’s called “Dharma Transmission.” Rinzai Zen is a rigorous lineage which uses intensive methods to break down a student’s sense of self, thereby revealing the mind’s nature. But using these same tools without extreme care and a very high level of training quickly becomes abusive.

Soryu does not have Dharma transmission and has no empowerment to teach on behalf of or represent that lineage publicly. I’ve spoken to several monastics who trained with Soryu in Japan. One indicated that other residents of Sogenji were “concerned” that the head teacher, Shodo Harada Roshi, permitted Soryu to ordain because of his mental state when he was training. After his first two-year stint in Japan, Soryu had a psychotic break and was sent home. It’s unclear how much time he actually spent at Sogenji from his bio and speaking with others at the monastery. Soryu returned to Sogenji for another ambiguous amount of time after his two years in the United States. The rumor is that Roshi asked him to go to India to train with another monk there after some time. Soryu then spent another unclear amount of time with an Ambedkar monastery in India and with other communities in Asia, but again, without any teaching authorization or any clarity regarding the terms on which he left those communities.

A good metaphor is as follows – Soryu Forall claiming to teach Buddhism is like a person dropping out of medical school halfway through and proceeding to open a surgical practice.

A Messianic Plan:

At some point during my residency, MAPLE’s larger vision was shared openly with residents. Soryu intended to double the organization in size every five years, establish centers across the country, and train new meditation teachers on something like an assembly line model — gradually amassing social, political, and monetary power to create a cultural sea change. In November 2020, he described the culmination of this plan: to overthrow the social order and establish a new Buddhist global government. Where Soryu would be positioned in that system was left ambiguous. The authoritarian undercurrents were not.

Cutting Ethical Corners:

The three pillars of training at MAPLE are described as “wisdom, love, and power.” One of the organization’s primary innovations on classical Buddhist thought is to become explicitly power-hungry in the name of serving others. In order to scale quickly, Soryu has to produce new teachers at a pace that no reputable Buddhist lineage would recognize as adequate. Incoming participants at branch centers are practicing with “teachers” who, by the standards of any credible tradition, are undertrained for the task.

In the instance of the founding of OAK, CML’s center in the Bay Area which was functional from 2018/2019 – 2020, the guiding teacher had three years of residential training before being asked to lead week-long, intensive retreat. This failed catastrophically because of the instability and abuse of power of leadership – see Shekinah’s piece here. In another instance, a junior resident at MAPLE (I believe less than a year of actual residential training) offered to allow Soryu to use property she owned in Canada to form a new center – Willow. Shortly thereafter, this resident was put in a cabin for a 40-day solitary retreat during which time, according to Soryu, she experienced a Jhana state, thereby giving her sufficient meditation experience to begin teaching in Canada.

The attempt to empower teachers this junior was an effort to promote the expansion of CML while externalizing risk and harm onto incoming participants who did not provide informed consent for what they were signing up for. The risks to ones’ personal spiritual practice by teaching too early are enormous. This exactly replicates the dynamic MAPLE claims to critique — seeking one’s own benefit while externalizing the costs onto others.

Consistent with this logic, in the name of gaining power to “benefit others,” while I was there, MAPLE engaged in the practice of deliberately targeting and cultivating, wealthy, powerful, and influential people, enticing them to come to the monastery with special offers (on reflection, this is what happened to me.) While I was in residence, two young women in their twenties who were heirs to a large trust fund were invited by Soryu on a special bike trip around Vermont. These invitations conspicuously did not seem to extend to young male visitors without trust funds. When major donors visited, residents were instructed by the organization’s Executive Director to “act extra happy.” The sort of behavior was explicitly endorsed by leadership as justified to serve the ends of the organization.

I also observed unethical fundraising practices. For many years, and I believe still, MAPLE offered a 3-month “free” apprenticeship program for those interested in experiencing a period of residential training. This program became their pipeline into their longer-term residency program. In the summer of 2020, a new group of young apprentices arrived, many in college or just out of college. MAPLE’s leadership decided that, because the apprenticeship was free, the incoming apprentices were morally obligated to raise money for the organization. One of their work practice assignments in the first few weeks at the center involved calling their family and loved ones and asking them for money to support their time at MAPLE. This was of course not disclosed until the apprentices had arrived and were already in training. If any of the young apprentices had a problem with this, they were assigned a more senior resident to walk them around the pond and help them “work through their stuff about money.”

Control & Domination – Qualities of a High Demand Group:

Soryu also constantly, subtly (with plausible deniability) engages in humiliation and shaming of training participants and those outside of the organization. For an example of the kind of constant, low-grade humiliation characteristic of the training at MAPLE, listen to the first few minutes of this talk from 2019. Notice how Soryu quickly sets up a dichotomy between good and bad, the genuine practitioners and disingenuous, creating an incentive for participants seeking approval to “want to be good.” In my experience, this created a strong in-group out-group dynamic where I trauma-bonded to Soryu through perpetually seeking his approval and repressing the parts of myself that felt shameful or “not in accord” with the training.

I observed numerous residents (between 5 and 10) over the course of my involvement with MAPLE who entered states of self-doubt and self-hatred – a dissociated and twisted version of a healthy conscience developed by meditation practice. When they would bring this up with the organization, they would be told that they just hadn’t surrendered deeply enough to the training. For some, this self-doubt and self-hatred cascaded into a trauma response which eventually resulted in a breakdown and they would leave the training. Some people would just cry hysterically for no reason, or have wild oscillations in behavior before leaving in a state of bewilderment and confusion. One resident created a plot to sneak out in the middle of the night while I was there. Three residents left the program in this way during my time there.

Cults scramble your attachment system so slowly that you don’t notice it. They make you feel like safety is dangerous and danger is safe. You grow to trust a community on the basis of positive experiences – of community, intimacy, self-growth, and genuine insights. But subtly, the emotional valence is also tinged with terror and threat. The narrative is that that threat is coming from outside, but it’s actually coming from inside. As you are acclimated to constantly being subtly terrified, you dissociate. You become numb. This is how cults work to brainwash people over time.

Idealization of the Leader:

In my experience at MAPLE, the rules and standards for conduct were at times impossibly high and at times completely negligent or non-existent. This is another quality of leaders of high-demand groups – they are erratic and unpredictable, leaving followers in a constant state of desperation for their attention while simultaneously terrified of receiving it, unable to predict whether they will receive shame or validation. This is an abusive quality that can be easily obscured in the name of “brilliance” as it has been in many other abusive spiritual teachers. There is a narrative at MAPLE that Soryu is a once in a generation teacher, a kind of genius or prodigy. In the future, people may respect him more. In anticipation of this, they record literally everything Soryu says in a vast catalog of talks. While I was there, there was one resident who spent about four hours per day listening to recordings of Soryu speaking and categorizing them. There were categories for talks that were “for the public” and talks that were “internal.” This was because there were aspects of MAPLE’s ideology that were deemed “too controversial” for public consumption. Participants had to be conditioned into “receiving his teachings” slowly. There’s a sense that the world outside is “too immature” or “not ready” for the truth.

Beyond Accountability:

Between 2021 and 2023 a group of past residents gathered testimonials from 15 past participants in training at MAPLE or their branch centers documenting firsthand experiences of misconduct or abuse of power. In February of 2023, we presented those testimonials with a letter documenting the patterns of abuse to MAPLE’s board of directors. In the letter, we documented patterns of emotional, sexual, psychological, financial, and spiritual abuse, deceptive fundraising practices, lack of oversight, lack of qualified instructors and hired staff, and lack of informed consent from incoming training participants. This was accompanied by 15 testimonials describing instances of the above dynamics. In response, two of MAPLE’s board members wordlessly resigned. Since then, no formal response has been made to our letter.

MAPLE packages itself as receiving its authority from the Buddhist tradition without any legitimate backing to do so. When pressed, they dodge into the corner of “well, we’re a new special thing that’s not really a Buddhist monastery,” but then refuse to abide by basic standards of conduct for a nonprofit organization either. As a nonprofit, MAPLE gathers little to no data about the outcomes of their training of past participants. Their staff is under-trained compared to similar centers. Currently, CML’s board of directors is now composed almost entirely of Soryu’s direct students, with Soryu as the head of the board. They are accountable to no one, and, from what I can tell, they do not want to be, not in the Buddhist world nor outside of it. When I was in training at MAPLE there was constant messaging that society outside the Monastic Academy was deeply delusional and was destroying the planet. This included the vast majority of other Buddhist teachers who might be qualified to provide corrective feedback and hold Soryu accountable. If they aren’t “really” a monastery, and they aren’t a conventional nonprofit either, what are they?

Once, I think it was in June or July of 2020, Soryu walked all of the residents down the hill from the monastery to a nearby glen. It was quite beautiful. We were all standing in a circle, I don’t remember the exact details, but I believe he asked all of the residents what we thought we were doing here. Various residents responded. Eventually, Soryu chimes back in and says “We’re trying to start a new world religion.” I believe him… I believe that they are trying. But instead, they have recreated the oldest religion of them all.

Sexual Misconduct:

There is one final thing that deserves mention. I am not qualified to speak on this thoroughly outside of linking to Shekinah’s article, however it is worth naming that, aside from Shekinah, a number of women have shared experiences of sexual abuse and harassment during their time at MAPLE. I do personally know of a number of young women who Soryu has given special attention to – namely inviting them on extended, 1:1 trips (ostensibly to do service for the organization.) In many cases these do not appear to have become explicitly romantic, but there is a pattern. However these are stories that are not mine to tell. Perhaps these women will feel empowered to come forward publicly too. I hope they will.

Final Notes:

For me, in the call with my mother that catalyzed my leaving, I had a sudden experience of realizing that the narratives I’d internalized during my time at MAPLE were leading to pain, not liberation. They were leading me to distrust people who I knew loved me and were in the direction of safety – past meditation teachers, my parents, others in my life who cared about me. I realized that I had true support that I could rely on. It was like a veil shattered. It took several years to “uncondition” my mind. I went back and forth many times on what I’d seen after leaving, resurgences of doubt followed by periods of deepening clarity. Over time, the story has become more and more clear.

Soryu Forall is in many ways a brilliant human being with deep insight into the crises we are facing. But the fundamental danger of any ideology is that, when someone clings too strongly, it can become a weapon. Buddhism is no different. Any well-intentioned movement can become abusive when it mistakes an ideological view of “the Good” for the living, contextual, and deeply embodied goodness that arises from healthy relating with others and the world. The basic doctrine of MAPLE seems to be that, if everyone meditated and took Buddhism seriously, the world would be a much better place. This may be true. But what follows is not therefore that we need to gain as much power as possible to make everyone meditate – to create this situation by force. The problem is that this kind of true goodness is not possible to scale or replicate through any kind of quantitative, assembly-line like process. Love fundamentally resists being made into a commodity. This is why good Buddhist communities take decades to train new teachers. It’s easy to learn that “meditation is good.” It’s very difficult to learn that meditation is good, while also releasing one’s rigidity around the practice, around one’s conceptions of liberation, of awakening, of anything at all. Generally, my diagnosis is this: Soryu’s view of “saving the world” seems to serve an abstract view of humanity at the expense of real human relationships which are expendable in service of an ideal. This is a distortion of genuine love.

I’ve recently been made aware that some pieces of negative press about MAPLE have been taken down – presumably due to lobbying from the organization. On MAPLE’s good reviews, nearly all of the positive posts are from long-term residents. When I was leaving residency, one of the “work practice” assignments for all residents was to post a positive review of MAPLE online. I imagine this practice has continued. It’s clear to me that, rather than engaging with the sincere process of healing and accountability that has been amply called forth, the organization has chosen the track of ignoring and denying the weight of the allegations against them while attempting to scrub the internet of the reputational damage they have accrued through their actions. At the same time, another past resident came to me in confidence, furious that Soryu has been intentionally trying to recruit young women from his own spiritual community to come to MAPLE. This is why I feel it’s important for me to share this piece now.

I would hate to see more people with an inclination for liberation give their life energy to a harmful organization under the pretense that it is a respectable meditation community. It is not. I’ve seen many people leave MAPLE with their passion for meditation destroyed and their trust in the Buddhadharma broken. This is an unbelievable tragedy. The Buddha’s teachings do lead to liberation, but even the Buddha himself shared that danger of grasping them wrongly:

Suppose there was a person in need of a cobra. And while wandering in search of a cobra they’d see a big cobra, and grasp it by the coil or the tail. But that cobra would twist back and bite them on the hand or the arm or other major or minor limb, resulting in death or deadly pain. Why is that? Because of their wrong grasp of the cobra.

In the same way, a futile person memorizes the teaching … and those teachings lead to their lasting harm and suffering. Why is that? Because of their wrong grasp of the teachings. – Alagaddūpamasutta (MN 22)

Luckily, there are real, beautiful, deep, and healthy spiritual communities out there. The teachings of the Buddha are alive in the world and there are profound teachers embodying them in myriad ways. A few strong Buddhist communities to consider if you’re inclined towards residential meditation training include Zen Mountain Monastery, Great Vow Zen Monastery, Abhayagiri Forest Monastery, Sravasti Abbey, Gampo Abbey, or Tisarana Forest Monastery. All offer programs dedicated to address suffering and are working to create offerings that meet the unique needs of our times.