First time poster here, I've been following the forum for a while, so I'd like to thank the community and Daniel for this space. I was a monk in the Thai Forest Tradition, and recently, for several reasons, I disrrobed.

I do not want to go into too many details or name names, but after spending over a year as a monk in Thailand and then Malaysia, I began to seriously doubt the possibility of adapting Theravada monasticism in the west. When I speak of adapting monasticism to the west, I am not only talking about establishing monasteries with Thai or Sinhalese financiers, but creating communities that harmonize dhamma / Vinaya with typically western values: democracy, gender equality, pragmatism, rationalism.

Among others, these are some characteristics of monasticism which, in my view, make it incompatible with Western values:

Inability to discuss experience in immediate, phenomenological, terms. Everything is filtered under ideological lens. I know, this is common in all sorts of discussions, but in the case of monks the map is internalized with a hierarchical structure to which they identify, in this way, any meditative experience contrary to the model (not to mention a criticism) is seen as a personal attack, a transgression of territory. And I'm not talking about discussions about what is jhanna, how are the stages of progression of insight or something like that, just that if a lay person or junior monk describes experiences not shared by a senior monk, the tendency is that you will not really be heard and will probably be labeled in a pejorative way (after all, non-circumscribed experience is conceptually dangerous, causes anxiety).

Lack of openness to information feedbacks. The hierarchical model by itself is not a bad thing and, I believe, necessary in a monastic organization (I can, and would like, to be extremely wrong at this point). After all, the presumption that people with more experience in the monastic life are in a better position to give advice and make decisions for the community seems to me to be a valid generalization. Also, at the end of the day, it is extremely complicated and tiring to submit absolutely everything to public forum.
However, in monastic circles, this hierarchy, in terms of information flow, is extremely unilateral. In other words, those who observe and make decisions are up, observing and ordering those who are down.
The biggest problem, from what I have been able to experience, is that many of these Ajahns are never directly questioned, and when they do, react extremely badly to it. After spending years, decades, with people literally kneeling and washing their feet, they unlearn to listen. They are extremely compassionate and humble as long as everything and everyone are in its proper place, but as soon as things go out of the order expected ... it is common to see them react with much less composure and social ability than a normal person. In fact, this was something that shocked me: how common is it for experienced monks not to have the least social skills, a lot of them: cannot deal with difficult situations or people; see small actions as offenses; and have years of grudge against each other.
I do not even want to start writing about the most futile motives for which I have ever seen monks discussing, it is enough to say that things that can pass by unnoticed in the lay life are causes for irreversible personal offenses that cause years of rancor for some monastics.
It seems to me that the lack of more immediate concrete concerns leads many monks to extremes of neurotic behavior and futile concerns.

Structural closure for material and political reasons that are never admitted: I refer to cases where monastic traditions cannot adapt to egalitarian values ​​(be it gender, monks and lay persons, etc.) because the culture of their supporters is opposed to this. A striking example is the Ajahn Cha tradition and the ordination of bikkhunis. They act as if there really was an argument to be made, but the truth is they just cannot do it. In Thailand, ordaining a woman is a crime, and they simply refuse to admit that the fact that they depend on a military dictatorship to keep their religious stauts informs their decision on the matter.

Having said that, I must also say that if this tradition did not exist I would not have had the opportunity to learn to meditate and would not have gone through some of the most important and pleasurable experiences of my life. My intention is not to criticize everything about Theravada monasticism, but to think of ways of reconciling that tradition with the values ​​of the West.
I am curious about other people's point of view, or just stories about contact with monks and monasteries.