WHY I TEACH THE WAY I DO
How I became a meditation teacher says a great deal about why I teach the way I do, and why I teach unlearning meditation and am unable to teach orthodox or structured forms of meditation. I had no ambition to become a meditation teacher and have never wrapped up my identity with being a teacher, though it has been my primary vocation for the past decade and a half. Meditation teaching is what I do out of a commitment to assist others with their meditation practice, and not as a road to material success or fame. Yet I have a contribution to make to the modern field of meditation teaching and practice, and do need modest support in order to continue this work.
I initially became a meditation teacher because I would listen to other people’s meditation sittings with a high level of interest and an even higher degree of knowing their meditation experience from inside of my own. This was not just empathy, but an outgrowth of continued awareness and examination into my own meditation sittings put to use to understand what goes on in others when they meditate. That people have found this helpful and have kept up regular dialogues with me, sometimes for several years, has turned me into a meditation teacher. That is not to say I did not receive some sort of training and do extensive study in the more formal setting of being a young Buddhist monk under the guidance of elder monks in monasteries and meditation centers in Sri Lanka. Much of what I learned during a one-year intensive training period, and the two years that followed of even more intensive independent study of the Pali language and Buddhist philosophy and psychology, has served as the traditionally informed basis for the development of my current way of teaching unlearning meditation.
The story of how I became a meditation teacher begins before I was a Buddhist monk. I was living in Nepal and had worked as an English teacher for four years, which was a job I just stumbled into, with no thoughts of making it into a profession. Towards the end of this period of my life in Nepal, I attended a 10-day Vipassana Meditation retreat in the foothills above Kathmandu. It was a “Goenka” retreat, which was heavily structured and run by teachers who played sequential tapes of Goenka’s talks and meditation instructions. All the participants did the same instructions for the same period of time and were led through a “program” of progressive stages of meditative development. I did the program without any difficulty, thinking that my experiences were completely in line with it and that I was an exemplary meditator, receiving some reinforcement for these beliefs from one of the teachers. Anyhow, I saw myself for the next six months as a dedicated Goenka meditator, and attended other retreats in Nepal and India. For me, like it is for most of us from Western countries, reading about meditation and becoming informed about it was very important, as was some kind of critical inquiry into what I was hearing from my teachers. But I was immersed in a world, which will sound more like a cult, where doing the meditation practice was believed to be all you really needed to do; reading a variety of viewpoints, honest self-reflection, and a critical analysis of what one was being told were all contrary to the explicitly stated practice of meditation.
When I began to question the meditation practice I was doing and the soundness of what I was hearing in Goenka’s talks, I also began to look more outside of myself at what other meditators doing that practice were experiencing. I remember this one retreat in Rajasthan, at the Goenka center outside of Jaipur, where I decided to do the retreat as a volunteer instead of as a yogi. One of Goenka assistant teachers was running the retreat. He was a middle-aged doctor, who operated a clinic in his home town, and was a long-time friend of Goenka’s. He did not like me for some unknown reason, as I tried to be of service to him and always be friendly, but I guess I must have done something accidental that set him against me. I think I might have done something that would be very annoying to a teacher, such as interrupting a dialogue between this teacher and one of his loyal students with my own ideas regarding what the student is going through. I do recall that I did not care for how this teacher appeared to neglect and ignore his students in distress while at the same time was pleased with students who had no problems and displayed appropriate devotion to Goenka. So on the ninth day, one of the foreign meditation students, a young man from the Netherlands, freaked out. He did not get any help from the teacher, so I talked with him about what he was going through and helped him through his fears.
This was the first time I had assisted a fellow meditator who was not my wife or a friend. The dialogue was not that profound, but it placed me in a position where I could draw on my knowledge of meditation to help another human being in distress. In the scheme of things as to how I became a meditation teacher, as I reflect on it now, I see the theme of students not being listened to by the teachers in authority and needing someone else, who is interested in their plight and woes, to step in and fill that gap. This occurred when I was monk and was carried on after I left the Buddhist Order and began teaching in Southern California in 1990.
Perhaps my initial motivation to be a meditation teacher was simply to become a “caring” teacher. Over the years, I have attempted to sustain a level of caring for students and a commitment to their ongoing development as meditators, though it is hard to do with large groups and during times of popularity, so I have had to periodically scale back and work with selected individuals.
That is “caring” in the sense many of us think about it. When we care about someone we are helping, whether as therapist, teacher, or friend, we give them a great deal of attention, listen to their stories and worries, and are there for them in times of difficulty. There are several meditation teachers who are caring teachers in this way and I applaud their contribution.
There is another type of caring for meditation students, which relates directly to unlearning meditation, and has been the prime motivation for my work on understanding the meditative process. This type of caring has to do with how people treat themselves in their meditation practice. I have heard far too many people speak of being hard on themselves in meditation, of the perfectionist and inner critic running their meditation sittings, and of intense feelings of inadequacy and shame in regard to their performance doing a particular kind of meditation practice. Often the response such meditators get to their predicament is to either keep doing the meditation practice they have been doing and it will all take care of itself in time, or do another practice that is more compassionate and accepting towards oneself, or just stop meditating for awhile until it all blows over. The only truly compassionate response I can have is to give such meditators a tried and proven way to unlearn what they have learned as meditation. Such needless suffering, aggravation, and tension can be lessened in one’s meditation practice while still obtaining many of the same benefits found in those practices.
This brings me to the main contribution I have to make to the field of meditation teaching as both a theorist and teacher. Since the very beginning of my meditation practice I was interested in the theory behind the instructions I was receiving, even though I would meditate, as per the instructions, disregarding all views on experience in an attempt to stay with the bare experience (which is a view of experience as well). I would do the meditation practice as faithfully as I could for some time before I allowed myself to pursue my curiosity as to what were the underlying views, beliefs, models, and values inherent in it. No meditation practice is taught without a theory, and I needed to be able to carefully consider the theories in the meditation practices I would be teaching.
As it so happened, once I studied the psychology and philosophy of Vipassana Meditation, I found that I disagreed with many of its basic tenets. At first my disagreement was in due part because the theories of modern-day Vipassana cannot be corroborated by the Buddha’s Discourses without considerable twisting of the Buddha’s way of thinking.
I will give a prime example of this. In modern-day Vipassana Meditation, there is the theory of momentariness, which states that one’s experience is constantly changing at a very fast rate, billions of times a second, and that each moment has it owns separate existence. When one moment ends, another new moment begins. The Discourses of the Buddha do not mention such a theory, and on top of that, present a different picture of how the mind functions. This discrepancy was common knowledge among several monks and scholars I knew (or read) while I was a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka.
The theory of momentariness is the backbone of the psychology of Vipassana meditation. Along with it comes a host of views on experience: one’s experience is linear and sequential with only one thing able to occur at a time; that there are definable isolatable states of mind with definite beginnings and endings; and that only the present moment can be said to exist. Based on this theory of momentary, linear, discrete experience are such meditation instructions as noting or labeling one’s experiences, being aware of the rise and fall of the abdomen, and trying to be always mindful in the present moment. These and other related meditation practices can be done without the teacher or student being conscious of such a theory of experience, but that does not make them free of the theory, just unaware of it. They are just as likely to be drawn into such views on experience as would someone who has learned them intellectually. That is because doing meditation instructions inevitably lead to seeing things a certain way; that is how the validity of such instructions are proved. The modern creators of meditation practices tend to work from the theoretical to the practical in their efforts to design meditation practices that lead to particular realizations.
Since I could not agree with such views on meditative experience (or the models of meditative experience that have grown out of them and are widely used to interpret the experiences of Vipassana meditators), what I had to do is look at meditative experience from a “subjective” perspective to find theories that would best fit what goes on in meditation. This has been an ongoing process of listening to people’s experiences and examining them in order to better understand what the person is going through in meditation. Not only what they are going through is important for any relevant theory on meditation, but also how actual development and transformation occurs through meditation. I hope to provide through my theories, at the very least, a justification for looking at as many aspects as possible of people’s meditation sittings before we make definitive statements as to what meditation is and where it leads.
I am not a scientist, but when I mention my work to scientists they often think I am in the business of collecting data on meditators. Though I do collect meditation journals and record all of my group sessions, my purpose is not to “study” meditators, but to use their recollections of their meditation sittings as the teaching material. The way to learn about what goes on in meditation, and thus how to meditate in a changing inner world, is to look at what happens in your meditation sittings.
This is not an easy area to explore. We do not have adequate language for much of what we go through in meditation. A good deal of meditative experience can only be understood by someone who has had similar experiences and knows the inner terrain. Many descriptions of meditation found in the literature on the subject are highly suspect, as there is a strong tendency for meditation students to report experiences selectively, and to do so in general and disguised terms. Often the student will only use words she has heard the teacher use to describe experiences, and, due to the wide-spread prohibition on meditation students telling “their stories” in interviews with teachers, large sections of meditation sittings go unreported. What are left are basically a few well-chosen meditation experiences that fit in with the instructions the student receives. On those rare occasions when a student trusts a teacher well enough to speak openly and honestly about her meditation sittings, it can only be hoped that the prohibitions can be lifted and the teacher can then listen.
I have probably told you more about why I became a meditation teacher than how that happened. Experienced meditators, who have sat with other teachers, when they meet me, often ask me: How did I come up with this approach? Are there other teachers teaching in this way? Is this approach accepted by other teachers? Or is it just too radical?
How did I come up with this approach? I came up with this approach to meditation practice and teaching through years of honest examination of my own meditative processes and those of others I have taught. It has evolved slowly and gradually over the course of nearly twenty years of teaching meditation and it continues to evolve.
Are there other teachers teaching in this way? Undoubtedly there are many teachers teaching something very close. This is not far from what many experienced meditators have discovered through their long years of meditation practice, only they may not be able to teach in this way, since they were not initially taught in this manner by their original, more traditional teachers.
Is this approach accepted by other meditation teachers? In bits and pieces it is quite acceptable to many meditation teachers from varying traditions. As a whole, only time will tell.
Is it too radical? For a strict traditionalist, it will most likely be seen as too radical, though some of what I say may make sense. For most everyone else, who may not have a meditative tradition to defend, it may seem a bit odd in places, but certainly not radical. At least, this is generally what I have heard.
copyright 2005 Jason Siff
© 2007 The Skillful Meditation Project