Obviously as a transgender woman, Zhen has had some wrestling to do with the feminine side of her being.  She (supposedly) trained in a variety of martial arts in China and played sports in America before doing so, both being pretty traditionally macho warrior-type disciplines.  As a gay man who has also struggled with gender identity issues I can relate and it is one of the primary reasons I was compelled to study with her.  I was so excited to meet a seemingly genuinely gender-queer spiritual teacher, because I thought it would speak to my own experience of the world.  When I was young I basically wanted to be a girl - always got the girls toy at mcdonalds, grew my hair out long, my favorite color was pink, all my friends were girls, etc. - these days I identify as male and use he/him pronouns, but I'm of the mind that all the world's a stage, and that in a certain way it's all an act, and when I have feminine moments they feel just as real and a part of my identity as the male moments.  

 

After this whole debacle we have all speculated that she may have decided to transition and change her name so many times as a way to escape her past, which is extremely hard to find out about and may or may not have been digitally scrubbed.  There's no way to know what's really going on, but what worries me most is that as a female it will be easier for her to have other women let their guard down, as has already happened.  It of course felt more natural for the group of women in the workshop to rub their nipples in front of each other precisely because Zhen appears less threatening as a woman.

 

I have been in a similar-ish situation where an older creepy man leading a sexuality workshop without any warning asked us to pair up and just straight up have sex in front of the whole group.  Obviously had I know this was going to happen I wouldn't have attended and ended up having sex with an extremely crazy guy who tried to burn down the premises of the workshop after I indicated I was not actually interested in pursuing him further.  True Story, y'all.  It's not hard to build trust with a group of people, and it feels weird to just stop something that's in motion to say I'm not comfortable with this.  Add to that Zhen's being a seemingly sweet elderly woman and you've literally got a kind of wolf in Little Red Riding Hood Scenario.  Yikes!

 

As I type out "elderly" I can feel her searching groupon for discount botox because homegirl definitely has a problematic relationship with her age and her looks because she got hella plastic surgery and regularly dyes her hair to appear younger, which she could just own up to but doesn't, or at least didn't at the time I was there.  It would be totally normal for her to say "I got plastic surgery in order to make myself look more feminine" or something, but she denies it.  One time she took JLo's hand and put it on her cheeks to feel it, as though that would confirm anything?  It feels obvious to me that she watched the "Coven" season of American Horror Story, absorbed Fiona as-played-by Jessica Lang's Saturnian child-eating moral compass and proceeded to dial up Jessica's plastic surgeon to complete the transformation because if you put them side by side they are Tia and Tamara, y'all, straight up sister sister.  But there is, of course, a reason she denies the surgeries and BOY OH BOY (said in the tone of Nicole Byer on "Nailed It") is it good!

 

So Zhen tells everyone that she went into approximately a 2 year silence in the mountains, only coming out of it to buy groceries, and that in that time she realized she was transgender.  It's a big part of her story, and one that felt compelling to me, as someone who is totally down with connecting with nature spirits and soul-searching, etc. - but what you don't hear about till you start talking to other people is that in the middle of that silence, some little birdy showed up at the studio with a flyer showing that Zhen was teaching a yoga workshop in LA of all places.  Obviously she was going there to get plastic surgery, and I have heard that she claims she taught the workshop in silence, but let me tell you, if I showed up to a yoga workshop and it turned out that the teacher was teaching it silently and had not indicated that on the flyer, I'd have walked out.  It's just not believable.  And she CLEARLY has plastic surgery, and obviously spent a lot of her time in LA getting that plastic surgery, not in the mountains in silence like she says.  The funny thing is, if she just admitted to taking a break from the silence because she realized she was a woman and needed to go get the surgery it wouldn't make me think any less of the time she did in fact spend in the mountains.  Perhaps it doesn't fit into a narrative she has in her head of what a spiritual leader should act like or behave like, so she wants it to be erased.  If y'all never read Mother Theresa's biography go give it a gander because homegirl was the queen of coverups and if Momma T ain't no real saint, Zhenevere Sophia Pagliacci Dao certainly ain't one neither.

 

What's more likely, however, is that she needed a more "spiritual" excuse in order to get her staff to pay for the rent of her studio out of their own pockets while she went and got surgery - yes, she literally had them paying the rent, and of course no one was coming to the studio for the student's classes because no one knew who any of the students were, so there was no income being generated.  To my knowledge none of her students make any real income from their teaching, and it's not something Zhen helps her students to learn, despite the fact that she literally requires you to spend a lot of money continuing to learn from her, staying up to date with whatever changes she's continually making to her Qi Gong forms.  At the beginning of the training she made it a requirement that you show up to study with her for a minimum of 2 weeks out of the year to remain certified, which could run you anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 dollars, plus housing and food in Santa Fe which aren't cheap, especially when I'm guessing the average salary for any of her teachers at that point was in the $4,000 a year range with no instruction on how to go about making more than that.

 

Supposedly as a teacher you could work with people in private practice applying yoga postures according to the principles of acupuncture, but lordy ok here we go, a whole nother can of worms.  Zhen would constantly talk about diagnosing people, even though anyone with any formal holistic health training knows it's illegal to diagnose people with anything if you aren't an actual Doctor.  I'm not even against this in principle, because a diagnosis assumes that there is a definitive condition, whereas for me, as a practitioner who works with people, I prefer to think of things as evolving, and I think it's important to choose words carefully, so I don't think diagnosing is even a desirable term to use, and I find that the desire to use it amongst any healing arts practitioners usually stems from a kind of intellectual insecurity and/or a lack of training.  You want to diagnose because you want to be considered equal to a doctor, when what you do is actually different.

 

Also, it is truly next level questionable whether or not any of her yoga poses or Qi Gong forms correspond with the meridians or have any therapeutic value.  Don't get me wrong, I'm down to explore this and I think they are connected but do I think the yoga she has you do is likely to be as effective as acupuncture at helping with certain conditions?  I do not.  Homegirl is making this shit up as she goes and it sounds cool, but it's all highly speculative, and absolutely should not be considered "diagnostic".  At one time she claimed that she had teachers who taught her her Qi Gong, and *then* she admitted she had lied because she felt too insecure to admit that they had been revealed to her during meditative spiritual fasts - perhaps forgivable in another circumstance where there weren't so many other lies floating around.

 

She also claims to have had a lot of private clients but it is truly a mystery how any of them might have sought her out.  There is not really any mention of a private practice in her online material, just public classes, and even if you knew what she was about you wouldn't really know what she was capable of treating.  JLo said she was once on the phone with Zhen when she was supposedly driving to Albuquerque to treat a client, but that she was just on the phone with her the whole time she drove to Albuquerque and the whole time she drove back with no intermission to see a client.  I remember her claiming that she told men with erectile dysfunction to stop lying and that those clients never returned because the treatment worked when, if they even existed, of course, they clearly didn't return because that is perhaps objectively good advice but obviously crazy.

 

So anyway, the Monday meeting is about to go down, and we spend most of the day planning.  At this point, I have not read JLo's love letter to Zhen, which JLo is planning to read out loud at the meeting, and I'm told to just wait to hear in full.  The final preparations for what to say are pretty rushed and there wasn't quite enough time, but it just needed to happen, and I regret in a certain way not demanding that JLo read the letter to me before because it was way too long and rambling and at the end of the day ended up just giving Zhen more time to talk because they agreed to have equal time and JLo went first.

 

But this is also the most interesting part of the story for me personally as someone who studies archetypal psychology.  The letter that JLo wrote to Zhen would come across as delusional to anyone who is only capable of looking at a situation on the surface, but it is clear to me, both by my analysis of the preceding events and more importantly by looking at  symbolic content related to Zhen's artistic theatrical production being based on Hamlet, that Zhen was gaslighting multiple women in exactly the way that Hamlet does in the Shakespeare play.

 

Anyone who utilizes dreamwork or does Jungian or otherwise archetypal psychotherapy knows that people's art is often a reflection of their subconscious.  For example, one time I got robbed by a guy who was subletting my apartment who claimed to be a comedian, and the *only* comedy video he had online involved him stealing shit from people's carts at the grocery store.  We often get obsessed with certain mythological or fictional characters because they reflect or represent our unconscious desires in some way.  Zhen was particularly obsessed with Hamlet and was producing a play that was literally called "Hamlette and Ophelia", and she had cast BOTH JLo and Britney as Ophelia in her play, one after another based on her dramatic whims, following them up with casting another assistant of hers who may or may not fall prey to a similar fate, we'll see (update: she did fall prey to the same fate).  

 

The play Hamlet is the definitive guide to gas-lighting, where you have this whiny brooding protagonist who is in love with Ophelia but straight up lies to her and says he isn't and never was, which drives Ophelia mad, leading her to commit suicide.  Sound familiar?  Zhen literally cast the two women she was seducing (but pretending not to) as Ophelia, a woman who is made to fall in love and be driven mad by Hamlet because of his neurotic behavior, in a play where Zhen herself plays the role of Hamlet.  In other words, Zhen directed a play that cast both of the victims of her crimes as the same character who suffers that crime in the original play on which her play is based. IS TRUTH NOT STRANGER THAN FICTION ARE WE NOT LIVING IN A SIMULATION HOW IS THIS REAL LIFE HOW DID I STUMBLE INTO THIS MADNESS?  And it's even crazier to me because Hamlet is *famous* for having a play within a play, where Hamlet writes and directs a play about his father's murder in order to see if his Uncle flinches while watching it in order to deduce whether or not the uncle was guilty of the murder.  So in this case, you've got the perpetrator of the crime in real life casting her victims as the character who suffers that same crime, performing her play that's based on a play not only as Hamlet driving Ophelia mad but also as Hamlet acting out a play for his uncle, as though the Uncle in Zhen's own subconscious is trying to admit to its crimes through the Hamlet in Zhen's subconscious bringing itself to light via a real world theatrical production.  I know, it's a mouthful, just read it a few times and you'll get it.

 

Given the lack of appreciation for depth psychology in the culture at large I'm assuming that this wouldn't be admissible in court, but to anyone with eyes to see it's really only right below the surface.  I actually brought this up to some degree the night of the big meeting, and upon hearing it Zhen's face looked deeply aghast, because part of her knew it was true.  Apparently the next day in class, though, she brought up my remarks in particular and said they were absurd because in the play she was directing Ophelia lives and becomes like a climate justic activist or something - I don't know, I haven't read the play, it's supposed to be pretty bad - which of course is in no way a defense of the fact that she was clearly drawn to the Hamlet archetype because she likes to fuck with people.

 

Unfortunately she perceives herself as helping the women that she fucks with, and in the meeting she read two emails from former students who had also lodged accusations against Zhen and who had, after doing so, apologized.  I guess some people took this at face value, not considering what Zhen might have done or said to them to get them back into her fold after traumatizing them, something virtually all predators are pretty skilled at, and not considering whether or not these women were actually trying to just put a band-aid on a big gaping open wound that they didn't really want to look at - the very fact that this was not admitted as a possibility by the school in reading those letters, as though they were meant to constitute actual proof, is suspicious in itself, but not as wild as Zhen admitting at the beginning of the meeting that something akin to the situation with JLo had happened 4 times in 30 years.  Doing the math, that means there's at least 1 other case that ended just as poorly by Zhen's own admission, but we are actually aware of at least 1 to 3 other cases in addition to the 4 she admits to, and those took place over the course of 5 or 6 years, not 30, meaning who KNOWS how many weird things happened before 2014 or so, and the fact is ONE time is weird enough y'all!  Just because you teach things about sexuality doesn't mean you're going to have a bunch of people fall in love with you y'all, and more importantly, and let me just iterate this like I'm screaming because omg it's true: JUST BECAUSE THAT TEACHER CLAIMS SHE'S NOT IN LOVE DOESN'T MEAN SHE DIDN'T DO ALL SORTS OF FUCKED UP AND MANIPULATIVE THINGS TO THOSE WOMEN TO LEAD THEM ON BECAUSE SHE CRAVES ATTENTION AND AFFIRMATION BECAUSE SHE'S A CLINICAL NARCISSIST.  I mean she is a leo moon so...I'm not sayin' I'm just sayin'. 

 

I was with JLo in the weeks after this and bore witness to the sly wording of Zhen's emails attempting to appeal to what was undoubtedly a close personal relationship.  As someone who has mistakenly felt empathy for the people feeling pain because I had to get angry at them for trespassing me, I know that it can be easy to fall into that quicksand.  Anyone who's deeply empathetic is going to struggle with that, and they're also going to be struggling with the fact that they now have to basically hate this person who they were just recently in love with, who also happens to be their professional teacher, the person to whom their spiritual teachings are attributable, and the gateway to whatever personal community they might have built over the years.  Santa Fe is a SMALL place, and it is no surprise that in the preliminary meetings before the big meeting there were other women who were scared simply because of the physical proximity you can't help but have to Zhen.  It's the type of place where you are bound to see pretty much everyone you know at least once a month at some point at the co-op or at wholefoods, and I can easily imagine someone thinking that it would just be easier to sweep Zhen's neurotic behavior under the rug in order to preserve their ability to connect with others in the community, many of whom are wonderful people, and in order to continue to want to teach something that some people have been studying, teaching and practicing for over 10 years.

 

I, however, don't give a shit, and I just hope that my words can help appeal to people's sense of normalcy.  The world that Zhen creates is weird and seductive because it's so bold, but she does it in order to prop up what is undoubtedly a very fragile ego.  I really liked so many of the people I met studying there and I would just urge you to read every word on this site because holy fuck if there is any way you can still kick it afterwards you iz in my prayerzzzzz.  In all seriousness though, speaking as someone who is VERY familiar with narcissists, there is almost no chance that you can do anything to help them and any psychologist will advise you to just get away from them if you can, so don't think they're going to change, it's not worth your time or energy.  Anyone who names themselves Zhenzan Zhenevere Zanzibar Sophia Dinglehoppin' Dao is *clearly* trippin' y'all.  

 

Get off the crazy train babes, it's already run all the way off the tracks!