Andrew Cohen. When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva. A comprehensive book review
Rise, fall and rebirth of a spiritual teacher
Introduction
The day after his death, I wrote on 26 March 2025 an obituary, primarily for my subscribers on social media, of Andrew Cohen (1955-2025), a spiritual teacher, Readers sent in comments. Many points were helpful. I integrated these points day by day into the updated obituary available on the Substack Post and WordPress. I made the last edit in the evening UK time) on Monday 7 April.
Photo of Andrew by Michael Robert Willliams, UK
A week later, I prepared a blog/post of shared views of the international sangha, including former students of Andrew, and others in the days immediately after his death.
Today (Thursday 10 April 2025) I put on this post a comprehensive book review When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva. Sub-title. The Challenging Transformation of a Modern Guru.
In my view, Andrew reveals an honesty and transparency throughout the book. Some of those who were traumatised may believe his sharing of his experiences, since the collapse of guru status, serve as a strategy to become a guru again. It is not my response, and it is not my interest to persuade others to change their view.
There are former disciples, hurt, wounded and traumatised, who still experience love for Andrew though he is no longer their teacher. I regard this as a noble form of love. Others have found a deep equanimity with Andrew and their personal history around him. Equanimity remains equally significant as love. It means their pain associated with Andrew has gone. Such former followers do not have to find in themselves love and forgiveness as a spiritual imperative.
Time does not heal the anguish, the hurt, and trauma. Clarity, insight and understanding heals pain.
People who dismiss the worth of people tend to be the ones who were brutally dismissed. Karma comes round.
Andrew and Alka, his wife, who was brought up in India, and Daniela Bomatter (he referred to her as his closest student) lived in Tiruvannamalai, India since 2019. Friends there told me their impression of Andrew. The most common response goes along the lines:
“Andrew has changed.”
“He has become soft.”
“Andrew listens.”
“He’s a different person.”
A Review: When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva
I have a purpose with the review. When we speak of Andrew and his personal history, let us refer to the rise, the fall AND the rebirth of Andrew. This review serves as a small contribution to the steps he took for a deep, inner change.
The review contains quotes from Andrew and names some of the spiritual/religious teachers who gave him counsel. Readers will need to read the book to read the range of benefits and insights he received from these meetings and therapy to help dissolve the daily burden of his ego formations.
Andrew entered into four years of inner work to find ways to unpack his ego to realise the suffering he brought on others and himself.
Andrew Cohen (1955-2025) from New York became a guru in 1986 after receiving Buddhist teachings/practices in the Buddhist/Advaita/spiritual traditions.
As a guru, he exerted power and pressure on his followers using aggressive methods to try to force his followers to make an ‘evolutionary leap.’
In 2013, his community in their centre in Lennox, Massachusetts, made an evolutionary leap when they rebelled against the authoritarianism of Andrew, told him to sign a statement of resignation as a guru and evicted him from Fox Hollow, the name of the centre. The community realised they could live without him and make a fresh start to their lives.
The book is a personal account of his experiences after his fall from grace. Andrew bared his soul of the torment and despair he went through. He took significant steps to find a way out of his daily nightmare, self-hating thoughts and despair that stayed with him.
He deserves recognition for his noble efforts to dissolve his ego that brought about his downfall. This review shows his ongoing commitment to the spiritual life. Andrew tells us how he felt about himself and others, who gave him counsel, where he went and the benefits he experienced. He goes in depth into the ‘mythic guru’ role.
An Extract from the book
Here is what Andrew wrote in the book about facing a personal crisis due to his treatment of others and his unresolved psychological/emotional problems, which came around to haunt him day after day for years.
Take a read…
Page 91
“I felt disempowered, humbled and devastated. I had been a guru for most of my adult life, and I didn’t know anything else. The guru had become my primary identity. It was who I was.
The moment I gave up my power by signing my resignation and surrendering my authority, I no longer knew who I was. …..I fell back into the self I had been before I met my master, the self with the sub personality of the loser, the one with a problem….
When my students saw me in this weakened condition, they were furious. Our fearless leader! Look at him now. The person they had known was nowhere to be found…The moment I gave up my power, I went from being a powerful, self-confident leader to being a haunted ghost…
So I retreated. In the evenings, I drank a lot of alcohol and took sedatives to sleep, just to try to keep myself together. But I was barely holding on…
Page 98
After two months, he began a journey of personal transformation. He flew to Melbourne, Australia, to stay in the Ashram of his friend, Swami Shankaranda, where the swami and his students treated him with ‘kindness and generosity.’ He wrote:
“Inside, I felt like I was trapped in hell. I felt so broken that the simplest gesture of basic human sympathy from these people I didn’t know touched me so profoundly.
Alone in his room, he looked at pictures of Mother Theresa’s centre in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), where volunteers came to care for terminal patients, clean open wounds and wash the sick. He wrote he shuddered at the thought of exposure to blood, excrement, pus and infectious diseases like leprosy and aids.
He flew to Kolkata and stayed upon arrival in Sudder Street, where internationals often stay. In the months following, he had counselling with two heavyweights in the world of spirituality/psychology, Jack Engler and Roger Walsh, both connected with Insight Meditation in the Buddhist tradition.
Due to his inheritance, Andrew had the privilege of international travel and more enabling him to have contact with spiritual teachers worldwide in these years of intense working on himself.
Page 100
“One of the tasks I dreaded most was assisting patients to the toilet. I would bring them to this vast, Victorian style bathroom, lift them from their wheelchairs, put them on one of the toilet seats and position them over the ragged hole. If they had diarrhoea, which was often, it would splatter all over the floor and my rubber flipflops.”
Page 102
As I scrubbed the floors of the center, my mind wandered to dark places….as if the devil was dancing in my head.
The last 27 years were all bullshit, a figment of your imagination. Your enlightenment was just an hallucination. You seduced others into believing in your spiritual fantasy. It was all fake…fake…fake.
Once a week in Kolkata, Andrew had a Skype session with Jack Engler, based in Boston, a much-respected supervising psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Jack has a depth of experience of the Dharma and provided therapy sessions for seniors in the Dharma, spirituality and psychology. He is the co-author of A Consumer’s Guide to Psychotherapy (1992).
Andrew wrote:
“Through my weekly meetings with Jack, I came to understand how parts of my psychological makeup had influenced my teaching style,” Andrew said during his sessions with Jack. He realised that part of his intolerance of other people’s weakness had been triggered by the shadow from childhood beatings.
After more than three months as a volunteer at Prem Dan of the Missionary of Charity, he described it as emotionally tough.
Back in the USA, Andrew reached out to a second heavyweight, Roger Walsh, also highly regarded in the Insight Meditation tradition for his wealth of understanding of the Dharma and also co-authored a book on peace and healing found in A Course in Miracles and its application. Roger is a leading authority on the benefits of diet, exercise and more for psychological and social well-being.
Andrew flew back to the USA and had meetings with Roger, a former professor of psychiatry, philosophy and anthropology at the University of California. Andrew reached out to Roger in his role as an integral transpersonal psychologist, enabling him to come to more and more insights about his past and its influence on the present. Roger is the author of Essential Spirituality.
Page 107
Andrew wrote of his meetings with Roger, “I realised I had been teaching from a place way above my actual territory,”
Andrew gave a touching tribute to Alka, his wife. He wrote of her ‘steadfast support’, who made it clear to his former Sangha of her support for her husband. He said some in the Sangha said she was in an ‘unwholesome marriage and brainwashed.’ Andrew referred to her strength of character with her ‘unfailing confidence’ in his heart.
‘That she always remained on solid ground was unimaginably precious to me. She went through the entire drama with breathtaking dignity and grace,” he wrote.
He returned to Sivananda Ashram in Rishikesh, India, to enter a personal retreat and continue his work with Jack Engler. Some former senior students of Andrew criticised Andrew, claiming he wanted to be treated as a guru there.
Page 106-115 (extracts)
Andrew stayed in Pondicherry, south India, where he rented a small room and ‘driving round aimlessly on my motorcycle, crisscrossing the lush Indian countryside ruminating my years as a guru…I kept staring into this dark abyss of no hope.
Andrew returned again to the USA, where he met with Robert Augustus Masters for guidance and deep shadow work. Andrew said Robert told him many details of the painful collapse of his own spiritual community. From 1986 to 1994, Robert led an experimental psychospiritual community that gradually became a cult. Masters is an integral psychotherapist, psychospiritual guide and trainer, with a doctorate in psychology.
Andrew wrote: “He abruptly asked me, “Now tell me about your shadow.” I was completely taken aback by his unexpected question.
The work we did was nothing short of confrontational, especially the role-playing therapy. Robert instructed me to visualise my students and speak with them all transparency about everything that had transpired between us. After I did so, he asked me to switch roles; imagine I was one of them, and consider what I had just said…
My heart just wouldn’t break and day by day I grew more desperate that the one thing that was really needed wouldn’t happen.
Page 115-116.
A former student recommended to Andrew he take ayahuasca, a sacred plant medicine with hallucinogenic properties. The plant grows in the Amazon rainforest.
Andrew flew to Brazil to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies under the guidance of Sylvia, a shaman and psychologist from Argentina.
Wounds kept welling up in waves, intensifying and subsiding again, as if to offer moments of relief to recover from these fierce confrontations with my demons.
Page 118
Sylvia said to him, “When are you going to stop beating yourself up?”
Andrew wrote, “Sylvia’s guidance was priceless and the ayahuasca retreats with her were seminal in healing my early trauma.”
Andrew’s work on himself via Jack, Roger, Robert and Sylvia, Indian ashrams and others began to bear fruit.
Page 189-190
He met with Diane Musho Hamilton, Zen teacher, author, who has received awards as a mediator and for her work in conflict resolution and with Sally Kempton (1943 – 2023), also known as Swami Durgananda, journalist, radical feminist, and meditation teacher.
Page 127-128
When Andrew turned 60, he and Alka went on a whale-watching tour out of Boston Harbor where they witnessed about 25 of these majestic creatures. Back in the hotel, they shared a coffee and sat in silence.
A sense of intense despair welled up from deep within me…. Suddenly, I heard something snap. It was my heart. The hard ice of pride in which my heart had been encased seemed to crack open and a deep truth about sentient existence revealed itself in a way it had never before. …
It was both unbearable and liberating. It was a moment of grace, the moment when I woke up in a deep way to the inescapable existential reality of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering.
Andrew described it as the culmination of a gradual three-year process of the inherent human condition of suffering to seep into my heart…
In other words, his heart had finally broken open.
In the months after, Andrew wrote an extensive apology to all his former students (see the text at the end of the book). He embarked on an apology tour to New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, Frankfurt, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
His former students heard from him his regret he had not treated them in a gentler and compassionate way.
Page 134
Andrew wrote:
I too needed to move on. I felt that for the time being I had taken my soul-searching and atonement as far as I could.
The mythic identity in which my former incarnation as a guru has been trapped had dissolved.
As I came to the end of the book, I got the impression that Andrew had discovered fresh ways of looking at the best of the Buddhist tradition.
For example:
In the title of the book
Deep sharing with respected Buddhist teachers
His transformative experience of the Noble Truth of Suffering
Title and content of his closing chapter, Triple Gem Integral
Reference to Three Jewels of Enlightenment. Buddha, Dharma and Sangha
Launch of Manifest Nirvana – to support spiritual explorers and provide a hub.
Page 227
In the final paragraph before Chapter 13 on Triple Gem Integral, Andrew wrote about a refreshing conversation with Philip Goldberg, a teacher, ordained inter-faith minister and author of a book on the evolving spiritual landscape in America.
I share his hope that we have all learnt from the hard lessons of the past; that we have moved into a deeper level of sanity and maturity; and that we are ready to prepare the ground for advancing the Triple Gem into a bright, new future.
The essential duty of a spiritual teacher gives priority to wisdom, love and freedom of the spirit. The teacher may employ concepts established for centuries in a specific spiritual/religious tradition or not. We use the language we feel at home with.
I regard When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva as an important contribution in contemporary spiritual/religious literature on the dangers of problematic transference between guru on followers and followers on the guru.
I commend this book.
Despite the numerous exposes of the behaviour of a minority of ‘gurus,’ it is hard to find such a depth of confession on the terror of feeling totally rejected, as Andrew shared with his former students, readers and his noble efforts for inner transformation.
Final Word
Some former students have criticised Andrew for stepping back into the role of the spiritual teacher. They claim he uses the role for his ego.
As a spiritual teacher for more than 50 years, and a senior in the Buddhist tradition, I would humbly submit the role of spiritual teacher has a deep significance, naturally, organically. Yes, it is vulnerable to getting caught up in the demands of the ego. Andrew’s story pays testimony to that. Being rejected by his disciple, it forced him out of the guru role for years.
About a decade ago, around 240 former students and others signed a petition saying Andrew should never teach again. It is an understandable reaction to their hurt and anguish, but their view does not make allowance for the power of radical inner change and redemption.
In my view, this book outlining his process for working on himself and perceptions of those who met with Andrew in recent times show he was now ready to teach.
As with us all, it is a work in progress in terms of vigilance with the inner movements of our ego. As the Buddha said: “I see you Mara.”
If a petition circulated in recent years for Andrew to teach again, I would sign it without hesitation.
Andrew’s story of rise, fall and rebirth reveals and confirms the heart of the spiritual message.
When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva
Andrew Cohen. With Hans Plasqui
Published 2023 by Inner Traditions,
Rochester, Vermont, USA.
$22.95. 276 pages.
ISBN 978-164411-590-9
Thank you for taking the time to read.
https://andrewcohen.com/
Thank you, Andrew. RIP.
Love
Christopher
Dear Hans, Thank you for your support for Andrew in working on the project of the book. Three primary reasons took place for my support for Andrew mentioned at the end of the review. 1. Reading the transparency in the book. 2. I know personally some of the US therapists/psychologists and others by reputation. He put himself in the best of hands. 3. In the six years, Andrew lived in Tiruvannamalai and offered satsang in recent years. I did not hear a word of him slipping back into his old problematic patterns, either in satsang or outside. As a servant of the Dharma, I don't believe in eternal damnation. Neither did the Buddha. love Christopher
Thank you, Christopher, for your beautiful and comprehensive book review. I wrote When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva for Andrew in very close cooperation with him.
Even though Andrew wasn’t my guru, I have known him for 32 years. At first from a relative distance - as a public figure, with only occasional interactions, then, from the moment I began writing the book with him, from truly up close. After the project was finished, I stayed in relationship with him right until the very end of is life.
After all the shadow work you list in your review (and that we described in detail in the book), the whole writing process itself felt like a further transformation/integration of everything that had transpired. It was an incredibly profound and continuous inquiry into the idiosyncrasies, vulnerabilities, shadows and most delicate human frailties that made up his complex character and how all of that stood in conjunction with his powerful radical spirit, his relationships with his students and his teaching means. I was continuously impressed by his unusual degree of transparency, sincerity and vulnerability throughout - but perhaps above all, by the immense love he continued to feel for all his students.
It was obvious to all who knew him well that Andrew worked with his shadows with great seriousness, that he recognized his mistakes and sought to correct for them, quite literally with all of his life force over the course of more than a decade. He was a changed man because of it. He did not double down, as many of his “colleagues” have when confronted with their mistakes and shadows. This part of his legacy, I feel, needs to be honored as well. It may serve as an important inspiration for the further evolution of the guru-model.
So, I can only echo the spirit of the short phrases from the “friends of Andrew” that you cited at the beginning of your review. During the last decade of his life, Andrew had transformed into a very different human being – yet he retained an equally powerful capacity to transmit enlightened awareness and continued to be graced with a precision and clarity of insight that continued to help those who sought him out.
The fact that, after Andrew I, an actual Andrew II had emerged is still, I feel, something of a missing link in the reality of many former students.
I sometimes find myself wishing that more of those who have carried hurt and resentment might have found a way to reconnect with him during his final decade in this realm. Who knows — perhaps it could have supported their own journey in some meaningful way. But of course, this is just my personal reflection, shaped by what I see from where I stand. Each of us has our own unique process, and there are many different ways to integrate, heal, digest, and transform.
I hope his passing will, like a balloon that has been punctured, equalize all pressures, as the essence of the evolutionary love that he was at the deepest level merges seamlessly with the space around us.
May all who were touched by his presence be blessed!