Ginny Taylor
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hello. I’m Ginny from Cincinnati. Right now, I am very grateful for my home. I just moved into a little pink house two weeks ago. Previously, I’ve lived with my daughter and her family, which was lovely for a while until I realized I needed to be on my own, and definitely needed to shorten my commute. The move went well, I’m 15 minutes from work, and the little house is set up nicely. I even have a shrine set up in one of the rooms I share with art making. My favorite books are any by Pema Chodron. Right now I’m reading Mozart’s Starling, a delightful book about the author, Mozart, and starlings, which are the most despised birds in North America, who knew?? At night, I often listen to deep relaxation meditations on the Plum Village app. I love coffee and dark chocolate. 🙂
Jana, you write: I find that I have a gift for creating a calm and safe space for people to feel grounded and secure, I often get this feedback from patients and students.
This is such a gift to give your students! One which, I think, only encourages them to return to your teaching. I, too, think sometimes the teacher receives more than she gives, at least that has often been my experience. It’s been a joy to be on this journey with you!Gwen, you write: There’s something uniquely empowering about being a “reluctant” teacher. Because I don’t feel like I entirely “belong” in that role, I show up authentically humble and genuinely willing to help. Students tend to respond well to that.
I can totally relate to this. I’ve never been the “sage on the stage” kind of teacher. It makes me very uncomfortable, yet I do admire those who can do this. I think showing up as a reluctant teacher does help one to show up authentically. My writing classes were always more about building a community of writers instead of, “Listen to me, I know it all,” kind of thing. I sense through this course that you are a natural leader. Your students are fortunate to have you in their lives.
So grateful to all the responses here, to all of you in the meditation teacher training.
I’m going to list my challenges firstly.
My challenges as a meditation teacher mainly revolve my issue with focusing on scarcity, what I don’t know instead of what I do know to be true. I’m new to Buddhist thinking, though as I look back over my life I have been reading Buddhist teachers for over eight years now. So that must account for some kind of immersion in knowledge, perhaps that I’m still not aware of. My challenges now also revolve around a question of if I am ready to teach, to lead someone else in this technique that goes back 2600 years, has a deep lineage, seems simple, but is so nuanced. Lastly, if I do teach, I think I will also be challenged to find students or even places to give a talk on meditation. I’ve been in this area for five years, two of years of during COVID, and I am only just now starting to make meaningful connections, something I struggle with in the best of situations.
As for my gifts, I am a life-long learner, this is one of my core values, along with honesty, discernment, and non-judgment. I deeply appreciate beauty and excellence in all things. I can see how some of these gifts will help me deepen my own practice, which still feels very young to me, but these can also help me to instruct another in meditation. I believe I am patient as well; my six grandchildren have helped me grow there!
As others have mentioned, I thank you all for such a wonderful experience. You all are so very intelligent and compassionate, and have filled me heart-opening wisdom. I hope are paths do cross in the future! My email, if anyone wants to reach out, is GinnyLeeTaylor@gmail.com.
Dominic, I, too, am struck with your idea to meditate before the challenging situation. Undoubtedly, in some deep mysterious way, this played a role in the outcome of your client meeting and with the conversation with your girlfriend that followed. Your essay reminds me that meditation, even if it just for a minute or two or three before a challenge can make all the difference. Thanks for sharing this.
Kimberly, I hadn’t thought about this split between leader and participant before in this way as an emotional sacrifice, but your essay has given me a lens to hold it this way. I also deeply appreciate the reminder to give oneself space and time afterward for reintegration and processing. Such wisdom! Thank you!
In January of 2019, on the Saturday of MLK weekend, I was scheduled to lead a three hour workshop on life transitions to a group of maybe 15 people. I had prepared for this workshop with training on life transitions, coaching people through them, what they are, how journaling can help, and how to hold a workshop for this. I had also done several other such workshops. But on this particular day, I was emotionally raw as my husband had just walked out of our 37-year marriage two weeks prior. I was in a huge transition myself that morning in the workshop.
In the week leading up to that Saturday, I thought about canceling the workshop, but I knew the woman who had helped to organize the event would be let down, though she would understand. That morning, we were also hit with what ended up being a blizzard. I prayed the workshop would be canceled because of the weather threat, but it wasn’t.
So I went, and led the workshop. I did mention that I was in the midst of my own marriage transition. As I recall, my bringing it up was a natural part of the conversation, and definitely not something I said right at the start of our time together. I didn’t cry or breakdown, and I didn’t dwell on it either, as I did not want the focus to be on me and my situation. I think I said it as a way of being in shared community with others in their own life transitions.
Looking back, maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Ultimately, the workshop went fine, and I received many kind words afterward on how helpful it all had been.
I have also taught multiple classes at the University level, along with yoga classes in a private setting. I do agree with Susan that, “To teach well…it is important to continually acknowledge this mystery to oneself and appreciate it [this important non-parity between student and teacher.] Forgetting it creates confusion, which is opposite of what teachers are supposed to do.” I am no better than my students, yet I have been placed in a role of teacher/instructor/workshop leader, and am to create/maintain a safe container. And this I have tried to do by keeping my personal life stories and drama out of it, and when I haven’t, hopefully learning from my mistakes.David, I really appreciate this: Perhaps, sometimes overcoming idiot compassion can be about letting others know that they have acted like a jerk, without also becoming one along the way.
I had a situation at work recently where I could have acted like the jerk, but didn’t. But I did hold firm to what I believed was true, similar to your note back to the original. I’m not always sure I do the right thing, but in the situation it felt like taking a higher road than succumbing to idiot compassion.
Rena, I love how both idiot and true compassion are expressed in your body. This is something I struggle with to feel, so I really appreciate your articulation here of how it feels to you, which helps me understand how it might feel in my own body as clues to look for. Am I in my head, or is my heart opening in some expansive way. Thank you for this.
Dominic, I really appreciate your definition here: Idiot compassion has in it a lack of wisdom and a lack of skillful means. It is very messy, and inauthentic, and is more like acting how one is taught or should act in a particular situation that calls for compassion. It is giving compassion, not necessarily to lessen the suffering of another, but to make yourself feel less uncomfortable in the situation. Basically, it is a misunderstanding or confusion of the true nature of reality.
Idiot compassion seems very selfish doesn’t it?
Thanks for articulating this so well.For me, idiot compassion is compassion based on resting in a safe, gentle place, or point of view, believing that all is right with the world because you are right. Idiot compassion rests in devaputra, or the mara of pacifying, which Chogyam Trungpa says is, “a spiritual practice based on ego, ego’s benefit.” It is a practice “involved with the duality of subject,” it is either this way or that way. Idiot compassion does not accept what is happening in the moment and working with that. An example of this, to me, is the right to life movement, where compassion is extended to a fetus, and not to the situation the mother or her family may be going through. Further, I don’t see much evidence of compassion being extended towards that newborn and mother in terms of support services, childcare, maternal health care. To me, this is save the fetus at all cost because it makes certain people feel compassionate and good about their cause, but ignores the mother’s needs, the needs of the family. This is an example of idiot compassion.
I’ve been guilty of idiot compassion in my own life. I once believed I could save my grandchildren, make their lives much better, be Mary Poppins. I saw my daughter and her husband as lacking in certain parental skills that I was sure I was much better at. I would rescue them from the snare of the TV, from parents who at times seemed more interested in their phones then in their boys. But I was seeing the situation as a way to boost my ego, as a way to move their lives towards a better situation from what I saw as a less than good situation. What a good grandma I am! I was practicing duality, I was practicing idiot compassion.
I recently heard Tara Brach on a podcast talk about true compassion as having a soft front and a strong back, something we maintain in our meditation practice. And I like this bodily reminder of what true compassion is. It’s easy to have a soft front and, at the extreme level, have idiot compassion, or it’s easy to have a strong back and be a bully. But it’s a challenge to have both a soft front that wants a peaceful environment, and wants to enrich life, but to also have a strong back to recognize when it is necessary to destroy or cut, or do hard things.
The moment I realized I couldn’t “save” my grandchildren, I had to cut that idea loose, and it was a very painful realization. Silly in some ways that I had even believed in it, because I can barely save myself let alone anyone else. Still, destruction of that idea was necessary. I can stop trying to be the hero and just be myself, just be with the boys as they are, and be with my daughter as she is. This is true, or truer compassion, I think. And honestly, it’s also a relief to not be carrying that Mary Poppins carpet bag around anymore.
Personally, I experienced trauma as a child, didn’t acknowledge it and its impact for nearly 35 years, told no one for over three decades, and then went through several years of therapy. I also did some yoga trauma-sensitive teaching training several years ago through the Trauma Center in Brookline, MA, where Bessel van der Kolk was doing the cutting edge trauma and yoga research I think David Treleaven alludes to in his video. And over the years, I’ve done a lot of personal research into the area of trauma and its impact on survivors, including Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and some trauma sensitivity training at work. That said, I do realize how widespread trauma, but I also don’t feel confident that I could recognize symptoms of trauma in another. Once in a yoga class, I had a young man who wouldn’t lie down and close his eyes during shavasana. He sat against the wall behind everyone, eyes open where he could see the door, which was fine, and I hope I made him feel welcome to do so. Later, I realized that perhaps this was a trauma response.
I think what’s in my tool kit to respond is just my awareness of the other and of myself, which hopefully will increase with continued meditation practice. One thing that I did also learn was to never take the agency away from anyone else, who might be traumatized, because the trauma had done that, and to do so again would be to re-traumatize. So I think even the language we use can be of benefit, like saying instead of “do this,” it’s “perhaps you’d like to sit in a chair, or on the floor, the choice is up to you.” I think this kind of goes back to what Susan was saying last week about encouraging people in their agency, not usurping this.
Over the years, I’ve become hyper aware that my flight-fight-freeze response is how I manage my own triggering. I feel an agitation in my legs, like bees buzzing, and all I want to do is leave as quickly as possible whatever situation I’m in. I’m still learning so much about this vagal response and how to manage it.
In the end, I’m not trained to counsel anyone with trauma, or PTSD. I can only help myself, which I’m able to do most days. And so if the student confided their history of trauma to me, whether in person or in an intake form before starting the meditation instruction (I hope we hear more about this), I would need to be clear about my limitations and encourage the student to seek professional assistance.
Kate, such beautiful words here. This: Feel the tight weight, the rush of heat, the speedy breath, then watch as it arises, abides, and dissolves. Things that used to seem so sure and solid turn out to be wobbly Jell-O molds. Take a bite and it turns into sweet life-juice.
Thank you for your example of how meditation can change a person. As someone who is new to this practice, your stories, like those of many here, help to encourage me to continue on when the sitting is challenging.Helen, your writing fills me with hope. My mother and I are not close, and she is aging. I wonder how I will be able to be with her if I’m given that opportunity. Your actions with your father give me guidance. Thank you.
Has meditation helped you to work with difficult emotions? If so, how do you think this happened? Why is this important in the first place? Give an example if one comes to mind.
Yesterday late morning, I learned of the death of a dear friend, Helen, who I’ve known for nearly forty years. She watched my children, helped to raise them. I always joked that when my kids went to Helen’s they came home cleaner than they arrived. She took such good care of them. Over the past few years, Helen has moved several times to be closer to her daughter, ending up in Colorado, in a small community where she wasn’t happy. Her health was failing, also. When my phone started blowing up with messages from my kids who had seen a post on Facebook that said she had passed, my immediate reaction was one of regret. Why hadn’t I tried harder to maintain more contact beyond just a card or two over the past few years? Why hadn’t I tried to visit when I was at least in Colorado? Why hadn’t I simply picked up the phone and called? And then my heart broke. I sat in my office, closed the door and cried. And then I had to move, which is a typical response for me when confronted with an extreme emotion. So I walked outside, let the tears flow for me, for my kids, for Helen’s daughter, for the friends she left behind, and for my regrets.
I’m someone who can be very sensitive, and feel things deeply. I cry easily. And sometimes this intense sadness is immobilizing at times.
I think what my meditation practice is teaching me is that feeling intense emotions is OK. That I can walk and feel the pain, be uncomfortable with it all. That I can cry and feel the tears. I can breathe through the tightness in my chest, and still feel my breath. The intensity will pass, and then it will return. And then it will pass. In the moments when I felt more stable, I reached out to Helen’s daughter, and to one of own daughters who had had a rough week.
Susan wrote this, “Please take on your meditation practice for the benefit of all.” I’m not sure I’m there yet, understanding how my practice benefits “all.” But maybe it’s beginning to benefit me, and by extension those closest to me.
