Buddhafield

Buddhafield is a spiritual community that formed around a teacher born Jaime Gomez, who used names including Michel and, later, Andreas. Its practice blended meditation, yoga, and personal-development techniques with a devoted communal life centered on the teacher, and the group relocated over the years between California, Texas, and Hawaii. Buddhafield became publicly known largely through a 2016 documentary made by a former long-term member, which presented the accounts of the film-maker and other former followers.

In those accounts, and in subsequent reporting, former members described a high degree of devotion to the leader and alleged psychological control and sexual abuse by him, allegations he has denied and which have been aired chiefly through media and personal testimony rather than adjudicated in a criminal court. The group is frequently cited in discussion of how communities organized around a single charismatic teacher can foster intense dependence, and of the particular difficulty of assessing such claims when they emerge years afterward through former members. A reduced community reportedly continued under the leader in Hawaii. As with any living group and disputed allegations, the distinction between former-member testimony and legally established fact is important to keep in view.

Buddhafield's story reached the public through its own home movies. Will Allen, a film school graduate who joined the group in his twenties, spent two decades as its official videographer, and when he left he took the archive with him. His 2016 documentary Holy Hell, assembled from that footage and from interviews with fellow former members, showed the group's life from the inside, the ballet classes and theatrical spectacles, the hypnotherapy sessions called cleansings, and the teacher, known across the years as Michel, Andreas and other names, presiding in sunglasses and swimwear. Against that imagery, former members testified on camera that the teacher had sexually exploited male disciples for years under the cover of spiritual guidance, claims he has denied and for which no criminal charges have been brought.

The film, which premiered at Sundance, prompted a wave of departures but did not end the movement: the teacher had already relocated with loyal followers to Hawaii after earlier accusations unsettled the Austin community, and reporting since the film describes a continuing group there under new vocabulary. Holy Hell has become standard viewing in the study of high demand groups precisely because of its provenance, a rare case where the visual record of a movement's whole arc, recruitment, devotion, doubt and exit, was made by a believer and edited by the same man as a survivor.