Yet another ISTA update

Bronwyn Rideout - 23 January 2024

A significant update came about this week, as ISTA and the Safer Sex-Positive & Spiritual Communities (3SC) issued a joint statement about the completion of the mediation process they had been working through.

This particular situation fomented on social media in mid-2022, with several threads and the creation of two major Facebook groups (Tantra Not Trauma & Issues with ISTA & Highden Temple) where participants commiserated with each other and deconstructed their experiences with the two organisations. According to the published timeline, entering mediation with ISTA was prioritised over Highden due to volunteer resources, although meetings with Bruce Lyon did occur.

While there is a joint statement, the bulk of the work was, and remains, the ongoing responsibility of ISTA, with a detailed accountability process outlined here. Three faculty members, Ohad Pele Ezrahi, Buddhi Dana, and Eugene Hedlund, are undergoing the accountability process, which includes the release of a public statement - of which Buddhi Dana has been the only to make one so far. The page that outlines Dana’s accountability process illuminates the many difficulties in commencing a restorative justice process while balancing confidentiality and possible re-traumatisation of affected individuals. As outlined in this section:

Buddhi Dana was upset because he didn’t get enough details to fully understand what he did wrong. He wanted to know more, but Lior [an Israeli mediator] couldn’t tell him more because of her promise to keep people’s stories private. Lior hoped Buddhi Dana would still understand how his actions affected the community. But it was tough for both of them – Buddhi Dana felt frustrated because he didn’t have all the information, and Lior thought Buddhi Dana wasn’t getting the point. Since they couldn’t find a way to solve this, they decided to stop working together in October 2022.

Another ex-ISTA faculty member, Andrew Barnes, has done the same, but predominantly for incidents that occurred in 2018, and he was removed from ISTA before wider concerns about ISTA/Highden came to a head. While many may feel that certain names are missing from that list, we are simply not party to whom complaints were made about, and whether they refused the mediation process or, as seen in Baba Dez’s documentary Sex Magic, they are accessing their preferred mediators.

Of course, it’s worth thinking about whether some of this could have been avoided if ISTA was developed more as a business with significant liabilities than as an organism. Then again, some within the ISTA and wider Tantra space do not see Tantra as an inherently safe space to begin with.

With ISTA now being left to prove itself by its own accountability process, it remains to be clarified if 3SC will have the bandwidth to work with Bruce, or if their efforts are better spent pushing for a more accountable culture shift.