My Guru Told Me Not To Be Gay

There is a moment in most serious spiritual paths where the teacher says something so wrong it accidentally becomes the most useful thing they ever said. Mine told me not to be gay.

I want to be careful here because this is not a story about a bad teacher. She was, in most of the ways that mattered, an extraordinary one. Lineage-held, rigorous, the kind of presence that could locate the exact thing you were avoiding before you'd finished your sentence. I learned real things in that room. The kind of things that rearrange how you move through the world rather than just how you think about it. I still use them. The transmission was genuine.

And then she said that. And something shifted — not loudly, not dramatically, but in the way that actually counts. The quiet interior kind. The kind you don't fully understand until you're sitting with it six months later and you realise it was the moment everything changed direction.

I remember exactly what I was thinking when she said it.

Not about the content — that came later. In the moment I was thinking about the tattoo behind my ear. The one that says faggot. I got it because I wanted to own the word before anyone else could use it as a weapon. She'd just told me to drop the pretty boy wounded Jesus thing, that if I wanted kids I should just pick a woman and do it, and now this — the suggestion, dressed in the language of simplicity, that it would just be easier for me not to be gay.

Thirty of her followers sitting behind me. Room fully mic'd. Cameras on. I was the only openly queer person there, which had already required something. But this felt like a punch down from someone whose foundational teachings, I genuinely believed, contradicted exactly what she was doing.

I had spent three thousand dollars to be here. I was sharing a double bed with a forty-five year old Punjabi Texan who fled the retreat entirely that night. Outside, a South Indian monsoon was doing what monsoons do — indifferent, total, relentless — while I spent the next two days swinging. Furious and then earnest and then furious again. Wanting to leave and then sitting back down. Wanting to write her off completely and then finding, underneath the anger, some small embarrassing part of me that actually wanted to turn the thing over and see what it revealed. Not as instruction. Not as something to follow. But as something to genuinely look at.

That part — the willingness to stay curious inside something that had genuinely hurt — turned out to be the most useful thing I took from the room. Not anything she intended to give me.

And I couldn't help but wonder — what if the most important thing a teacher ever gives you isn't the thing they intend to give you? What if the transmission worth keeping is the one that arrives in the moment they get it wrong?

I should back up.

I have spent about eight years doing what I can only describe as trying to find the thing that doesn't move. Not in a zen poster way. In a very practical, slightly obsessive, occasionally absurd way that looked, from the outside, a lot like a hero's journey and felt, from the inside, like being guided home by flowers. There were spooky happenings. There were synchronicities that defied reasonable explanation. There were high points and genuine mistakes and rooms that changed me and rooms that didn't.

The Masons didn't. I left the night of my initiation — after the swords, after the blindfolds, after the ceremony that was genuinely ancient and genuinely serious — because of a feeling. Not a thought. A feeling. The distinct, embodied sense that nothing had actually changed. Not in the ways I'd felt when I had been navigating my own processes, surrendering to something that moved through me rather than being handed something from outside. The Masons had a beautiful container and an empty centre. Or an empty centre for me. I walked out and kept walking.

It wasn't all that graceful, the eight years. There was a yoga teacher training that turned out to be a boot camp — thirty people, fifteen days, the kind of intensive that just purges everything whether you're ready or not. By day fifteen, me and my fifty-year-old Canadian best friend were screaming at each other in the cafe because all this stuff had just worked its way out of our bodies and had nowhere else to go. We were both mortified and neither of us could stop. I also, at one point, smuggled a guy in for a massage, which tells you something about both the state I was in and my general approach to institutional rules.

I sat with teachers across more traditions than I can cleanly list. I studied across four degrees and finished none. I wanted broad understanding, not credentials. The kind of clarity that institutions are specifically structured to prevent.

I was looking, underneath all of it, for a framework honest enough to hold what I had already experienced and humble enough to admit what it didn't know. What I kept finding instead was the same structure in different costumes. Someone at the front who had the thing. A room full of people hoping it would be dispensed to them if they were open enough, devoted enough, willing enough to be changed.

I was extremely good at being willing to be changed. Too good, it turned out.

Because here is what the gay guru moment actually broke open. When the teacher says something you cannot agree with — not intellectually, not in your body, not anywhere — you are suddenly holding your own discernment again. You feel the weight of it in your hands. And you realise you'd put it down. And then you realise you'd been putting it down, in rooms like this one, for years. Picking it up on the way out. Telling yourself that was just how learning worked.

And I couldn't help but wonder — how much of what I called spiritual development was actually just a very sophisticated way of finding someone else to be responsible for my own knowing?

Which got me thinking about something I've been sitting with for a lot longer than any of this.

I think most of us have abandoned something. Not through malice. Through practicality. Through the specific adaptations required to survive the particular version of growing up that was yours. You left something behind at some point because it wasn't safe, or it wasn't useful, or no one around you knew how to hold it, and you just kept moving and eventually stopped noticing it was gone.

For me it was the masculine. I had reasons. The role model was unreliable — addiction does that, absence does that — and the cultural versions on offer were frankly unappealing, and it was easier, and in many ways more pleasurable, to live everywhere but there. I am a queer man who spent years being very comfortable with his feminine and quietly, practically, completely estranged from his own power.

I've been writing about this for a while, under a different name. The short version is: I spent a long time chasing love in ways that were really just trying to get back something I never got from my father — not because he was cruel, but because he was elsewhere in the ways that matter, and you don't know what that costs you until you're thirty and still picking men who need rescuing. And once I actually sat with that — once I stopped dressing it up and just felt it for what it was — the question on the other side was stranger and more interesting than I expected. What is love, if it isn't needing to be needed? And would it still be men I loved? The answer so far is yes, though love is considerably more fluid than I once understood it to be.

The crisis of masculinity that everyone is talking about right now is not, at its root, a political problem. It is an interior one. About a quality of grounded, embodied, non-performative power that most of us were never shown how to inhabit. And I want to say this with the most love I have — to the men especially, but also to the girlbosses, I see you — I think a lot of us are doing some version of this. We either overcorrected into aggression or quietly left it behind. The reconciliation that's needed is internal first. In every body. Men especially, but not only.

The guru didn't give me that insight. She held up a mirror by saying something so wrong it forced me to find my own ground to stand on. And when I actually stood on it, really stood on it, the ground was more solid than anything I had been handed by anyone.

And I couldn't help but wonder if all of it — the eight years, every room, every teacher, every ceremony — was just an extremely elaborate way of arriving back at what was here all along. Finally stopping. Finally seeing. The quiet realisation that underneath everything you learned to be, to survive, to give the world — the thing you actually are was there the whole time. Whole. Complete. Witnessing you try to fix an idea of yourself. Watching you happen to the world again and again, never once invited to question whether the beliefs you inherited were the thing that needed looking at.

I wrote something longer about all of this. A proper attempt at the cosmological case, the historical case, the developmental case for why the oldest frameworks might be the most honest maps we have. It has physics in it. Real physics. And Hermetic philosophy and Human Design and mystery school lineages and a section on Aboriginal cosmological knowledge that I worked very hard to get right.

I wrote it in a forest. On a Tuesday. The day I resigned from a job I had built over six years, on the Pisces new moon, which felt like the kind of alignment you either honour or spend the rest of your life explaining why you didn't. I had a resignation letter and a little joint and the birds were doing what birds do and the privacy of the trees felt like permission.

I wrote what I had been trying to say for five years. But couldn't, until I actually stopped saving.

The actual thing it points at — underneath all the frameworks and traditions and eight years of rooms — is something much simpler.

There is something in you that has not moved. It was there before the adaptation, before the wound, before the very reasonable decisions you made about who it was safe to be. It watched the whole thing and is still watching. Steady. Present. Quietly certain in a way the rest of you sometimes isn't.

You don't have to earn it. You don't have to be healed enough, done enough, finished enough. You just have to stop, for long enough, to notice it's already here.

No one is coming to give it to you. That's the news. And sitting in that forest, I couldn't help but wonder if that's actually the best news there is.