Starting to finish.

I'm usually someone who is open and willing to accept the blame in things that go wrong. I think that is an important trait I learned while in the monastery. I think this is especially important when dealing with problems of the interpersonal type. No matter what interpersonal issues arise, chances are everyone involved had their faults in it. And it's almost always the best position to first of all acknowledge and deal with your own fault in a problem before tackling the faults of others. I think there also comes a point where all avenues have been exhausted, and it's time to give up the situation altogether. I definitely think it's foolish to give up on relationships without first putting in the solid effort to fix the problems in them, but I also think there comes a point where defeat has to be admitted. Knowing exactly when to admit defeat is probably the toughest part of interpersonal dealings.

Over the years, as my time as the manager of the monastery, and the most proficient communicator of our management and leadership team, I often had to write letters to our authorities about the problems that were arising with other members of the monastery. Sometimes I had to describe in detail some of the problematic behaviour that was going on, whether it was dishonesty, rough dealings, overly competitive relationships or personality clashes. This time, I was given two days off by the management team to write an e-mail explaining my own problems, with a sense of much more severity than the e-mail I had sent the year before.

I sent an e-mail to my Guru explaining in a fair amount of detail why I was finding it so stressful to continue living in the monastery. I think I have pretty much explained everything in my previous updates. For one, I was feeling overwhelmed by all the of responsibilities that I had to deal with. I was cooking three days a week for universities, trying to run a dynamic program with the sustainability network, looking after the books and accounts, monitoring income and expenditure, and book sales, making sure bills were paid, and people were fed and everyone had something to do. I had to communicate with people around the country, even around the world, to keep everything running. And I found myself being the person who had to think for everyone else in the monastery. I was glad to have a lot to do, but it was just becoming more than I could cope with, but every month it seemed like something new was being added to my list of things to do. I just wasn't a strong enough, or organised enough person to be able to deal with it all.

I was also having a hard time dealing with the others in the monastery. I think partly because I was doing so much, and often having to pick up the pieces and spend sometimes days fixing mistakes that others had made. It feel like I was holding everything together sometimes while the others were blissfully unaware how we continued surviving week to week.

I just didn't have the compassion or leadership skills to delegate tasks out to others very well. I had a hard to accepting the inabilities of others as I saw them. Every management meeting just filled me with frustration as we discussed for hours with no firm result on anything in the end. I just didn't have the strength to rectify these issues on my own.

Because of all of this I had started becoming less and less enthusiastic with my spiritual practices. Finding time to read was made doubly hard by the fact that I started to dislike reading altogether. Focusing on my chanting and meditations became more difficult as I was either rushing to finish my rounds before I had to start cooking, or else I was sleeping in because of exhaustion and having to chant instead of attending the morning prayers and programs. I just started to lose attraction for these things as time went by. And in the meantime, my attraction had started to become preoccupied with things like my bike, and thoughts of activism, and the prospects of leaving the monastery and starting to a career.

I wrote all this in my e-mail to my Guru, and said that, in my opinion, it was time for me to leave the monastery, I just wasn't going to be able to remain there peacefully much longer. At the time of writing it, I was pretty certain that I wanted to leave Krishna consciousness altogether. But, at the end of the e-mail I said that I wasn't going to rule out any possibilities. At that point I was feeling a bit pragmatic about it all. I was feeling less and less satisfied with the philosophy as it was presented to me, so my contemplations of remaining within the community were of a more pragmatic nature, if it suited my purposes I would stay. At the very least it would give me a chance to continue working on my personal character.

One thing I found incredibly interesting about this period of time was how interested the management was to ensure that no one else in the monastery knew I was having personal struggles. That was something I never liked that much. There was a culture within the community of silence when there were problems, especially problems with people who were looked up to within the community. It was like the other managers and leaders of the monastery were a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that I was being totally open about how I was feeling in the situation. They didn't seem to have the precedents to rely on to deal with it at all. And so when some of the other monks asked why I was getting a few days off, they weren't certain how to answer them. If they asked me, I would just tell them. I was beyond the point of burn-out, and I was writing to my Guru to let him know that things needed to change and fast.

There were several results to my e-mail. My Guru called up at some point, I recall, and we had a brief chat about things. He said at first that he would look into things, and try and find a way for me to pass on my responsibilities to others so that I could have a break from management. He said that I had reduced his stress over the years by looking after the place nicely, but now I was feeling that burden too strongly myself, and so it was causing it's damage to me. However, it wasn't until a month or even longer I think, maybe two months had gone by that it was finally decided that I would split up my services and spread them amongst some of the other monks in the monastery.

My Guru also decided that he wanted each of the members of the management team, at that time four of us, to get together and discuss our strengths and weaknesses. He asked me to write to him with all my possible complaints that I may have about all the other members of the management team. I wrote a novel, which I always do when I write. He was definitely concerned, and disappointed by some of the things I had to report. But despite his constant requests to have a meeting together it just never happened. Our management team was notorious for NEVER honouring meetings and meeting times. We made plans for meetings on many occasions, which never happened, and simply resulted in me becoming more and more dissatisfied in my situation. When we finally did manage to get it together to have these meetings, the result was even more depressing. It turned into an empty show. We would spend time focusing on one member at a time, and we would each discuss what we perceived were their strengths and weaknesses. It was good in the sense that, for the first time, we discussed some of the major character flaws we saw in others. The downside was that, despite having these things shown, there was no effort to improve that I could see from anyone else. I was also especially disappointed that, when it came time to discuss my strengths and weaknesses, I was left being complimented and given very little to work on. I was a harsher critic on myself than the rest of the managers were.

The third thing that happened after my letter was that my expressed desire to leave the monastery was, for the most part, dismissed. Within the Krishna community, if you are not a monk it is pretty much expected that you will be getting married. There were aspects of that part of the community that I found a little bit odd. In particular was the fact that a lot of the ladies seemed to discuss their marriage hopes amongst themselves. Since leaving I have heard from a few friends that some certain members of the female side of the community had their eye out to marry me, which I have to say is something I find a little bit creepy now.

When I said that I wanted to leave the monastery, the connotation was that I wanted to get married. Which i don't think was entirely the case, but within that community that was the connotation. I definitely knew that I just wanted to do a whole bunch of things which weren't really suited for a monk to do. I wanted to get involved in activism, I wanted to ride my bike, and have a few different bikes. And I even wanted to go to hardcore and punk shows, and see my little brothers' bands play. I wanted to be able to visit my friends outside of the Krishna community without having to feel guilty for doing it. So, essentially, I didn't want to be a monk anymore.

The basic reply to my request to leave the monastery was that getting married would be an even more stressful and frustrating endeavour than the monastery was for me. That living with a woman would be infinitely worse than living with 8 monks, regardless of how annoying I found the other monks.

I found this response a little bit frustrating for various reasons. If someone is asking to leave a monastic life, I would think it would be best for them to leave. But, I also disliked the dichotomy of 'either monk or married'. Ex-monks tend to be married rather quickly, and often through arranged marriage situations, with some choice exercised. I didn't like the thought that if I left the monastery, I would be instantly encouraged to prepare for marriage, and then lined up with a single woman from the community. For starters, as I said in my previous update, my parents are my primary example of a successful marriage. I could not see within the Krishna community a relationship that came close to theirs. And even worse, from what I knew of the ladies in the community, I didn't really see any who I thought were capable of that. My Guru sometimes let me know about the struggles in the ladies communities, I think perhaps sometimes he was trying to discourage me from considering leaving the monastery by letting me hear how 'crazy' the ladies were. I'm sure they are nice people, but as I've told a few friends, if I ever do consider marriage, I'm not the type of person to settle for less. And since I was already considering leaving that community as it was, it didn't seem pragmatic to get myself in a marriage situation within that community, only to leave anyway. That wouldn't be a very considerate approach at all. I think it is sad that sometimes marriage has been used in that community to retain members. Not so much in the immediate community that I was part of, but the Krishna community in general had that approach many times.

Essentially, the result of my raising personal concerns, and acknowledging that I wanted to leave was that I was given the chance to offload my services, and train other people to take over my jobs. That and I was given a trip to India as a spiritual recuperation trip, a trip that I never ended going on. For me, I considered this the final death thralls of my spiritual life. The only thing keeping me now was that I liked the projects I got to do as a monk with the eco and sustainability community, but once the year came to an end at the universities, and once I had managed to sufficiently train up some replacements, in my mind I would be free to leave the community altogether.

The last six months or so that I spent in the monastery were probably my most stressfree of all the years I was there. The main reason was that I knew the time was coming to an end. I had made up my mind, I was preparing to leave Krishna consciousness.