Still becoming—can you teach while transformed
You are reading about Trungpa and feeling the vertigo: a man who taught liberation while sleeping with his students, who built a Buddhism for the West while demolishing every traditional boundary that should have protected it, who spoke with absolute clarity about ego while his own ego seemed to operate without restraint. And you are holding something you haven’t named—the possibility that the teaching was real even though the man was broken, or worse, that the brokenness was the teaching, and you don’t know which possibility terrifies you more.
You are also, I suspect, someone who holds others. A teacher, a healer, a leader of some kind. And you are wondering whether it’s possible to transform people while you yourself are still being transformed—still making mistakes, still caught in contradictions, still learning the difference between authority and truth. Trungpa’s life is not an answer to that question. But it is the question made visible.
The House That Moves
Picture a man constructing a building while standing inside it. The walls are solid, the blueprint is clear to everyone who enters—students, teachers, visitors all see the structure he has made. They trust it. They build their own practices inside these walls. But then, without warning, one wall shifts. Not collapses. Shifts. The floor beneath everyone’s feet sends up a tremor. No one knows if the house is failing or if the architect always intended this—if the movement is part of the design. The man keeps building. The walls move again. And now the people inside begin to understand: the moving is the building. The structure was never meant to be fixed. It was meant to teach you how to stand when the ground is alive.
This is what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche embodied, and what makes his life so difficult to hold. He was not a man who achieved enlightenment and then taught from a fixed place. He was a man who was becoming enlightened, or becoming something—transformation itself—while simultaneously holding the role of teacher, authority, guide. The walls of his monastery moved. The walls of his ethics moved. The walls of what Buddhism was supposed to look like in the West moved, and everyone inside felt it.
Why the paradox had to be lived
Because teaching transformation to others while you yourself remain rigidly fixed is a lie that people sense in their bones, even if they cannot name it. Trungpa understood something that most teachers avoid: authentic change cannot be transmitted from someone who has already stopped changing. The moment you become the finished product, the teaching becomes a monument, not a living transmission. And a monument cannot wake anyone up.
But there is a cost to this—a cost he paid and made everyone around him pay. When the walls are moving, people get hurt. Students who needed stability were given uncertainty. Students who came seeking safety were given a teacher who was also drunk, also struggling, also caught in his own ego even as he was cutting through the egos of others. The house that moves teaches you something real about reality—that nothing holds still, that all forms are temporary, that you cannot build your peace on fixed ground. But learning this lesson inside an actual building, with an actual person who is supposed to protect you, means you get scraped. The walls move and you bleed. This is why so many of his students carry both profound gratitude and profound harm. He taught them how to live in a world that doesn’t stay still. He also traumatized them. Both things are true.
Meeting the paradox in yourself
If you hold others—if you teach, or heal, or lead—you are already living inside this paradox whether you know it or not. You are asking people to change while you yourself are changing. You are holding authority while also being human, flawed, still learning. The question is not whether you can become perfect enough to deserve the role. The question is whether you can become conscious enough to hold the contradiction without lying about it.
This is where real help becomes not wisdom but necessity. A good therapist, a trusted circle, a spiritual director who is not your student—these are not signs of weakness. They are the walls inside the moving house that keep you from becoming Trungpa: a man so convinced of his own awakeness that he stopped seeing the harm he was causing. You will make mistakes. You will misuse your power sometimes. You will be caught in your own unconsciousness even while you are helping others move through theirs. The difference between a teacher who transforms people and a teacher who wounds them is not perfection. It is rigorous, continuous, sometimes agonizing honesty about what you are doing and who you are doing it to. Find people who will tell you the truth when you are moving the walls in ways that hurt. Find people you cannot rationalize away.
And understand this: you are not meant to build a perfect house. You are meant to teach people how to live in a house that is moving. That is harder. That requires you to move too.
| What runs through your mind | What’s actually true |
|---|---|
| If I’m still figuring this out, I have no right to guide anyone else. | Teaching and transformation are not the same as having arrived. You teach by being honest about where you are in the process, not by pretending you finished it. |
| If I admit my contradictions, my students will lose faith in me. | They will lose faith in the false version. They will develop faith in something real—a human being who is actually awake instead of performing awakeness. |
| Trungpa got away with harm because people gave him ultimate authority. So I should give no one authority over anything, including me. | The answer is not to abdicate all power. It is to stay accountable to people who have permission to tell you the truth, even when—especially when—you don’t want to hear it. |
| The fact that I’m uncertain means I’m doing something wrong. | The fact that you’re uncertain means you’re paying attention. Certainty in a leader is the first sign of danger. |
A little help, while you’re here
- Name one person today—not someone who works for you or depends on you—who will tell you hard truths about your blind spots. Write their name down. If no one comes to mind, that is the first thing to fix.
- Write out one specific way you are still being transformed, still learning, still wrong about something. Not vaguely, specifically. Then ask yourself: do my people know this about me? If they don’t, tell one of them.
- The next time you notice yourself rationalizing something you did that hurt someone, pause before you finish the rationalization. Say it out loud to someone who loves you and will not let you get away with it. Then listen.
Standing in a living house
Trungpa built something real—a Buddhism that was alive, contemporary, dangerous, true. The walls he moved are still moving. His students are still learning, still processing, still figuring out what they received from him and what was taken from them in the receiving. This is the mark of authentic transmission: it doesn’t end. It doesn’t resolve into a clean narrative. It stays alive, keeps transforming, keeps asking you to build while the ground moves beneath you.
You will not be Trungpa. You will not teach with his brilliance or his recklessness. But you are being asked to do something just as difficult: to hold people while you yourself are held by nothing fixed, to teach transformation while you are still being transformed, to stay coherent enough to lead while every wall you built for your own stability is discovered to be temporary. The house will move. You will move inside it. The people you guide will feel the floor shift. This is not a failure of the building. This is the only kind of house worth standing in.
Stand in it. And find the people who will remind you, when you forget, that the walls are supposed to move—not to hurt anyone, not to excuse harm, but to teach everyone inside that the only solid ground is the willingness to keep learning while the earth itself is alive.