Lauren Lesser
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When we began giving 1:1 instruction to each other, I was delighted to find that I felt grounded and that I felt a sense of spaciousness. I did some stumbling around the words; sometimes feeling too wordy, sometimes aware that I was using other’s words, yet to my surprise, I did not feel too fussed. I trusted, that, with practice, I would find the pace that would be useful and that I would develop words that I could offer that came from a genuine place. I knew I had a lot to learn and would continue to learn, but I really felt like I was in process with “my student” from the start and that felt exciting and affirming. When I had the meeting with Susan, her feedback was useful and kindly given; she told me to slow down the instruction because it didn’t leave her time enough to follow, and later she asked me if I was doing the practice while I was offering instruction. What I heard was “you are not present in the experience nor are you facilitating a space so your student can be” and I found myself re-encountering my tendency to forget, to doubt and assail myself with aggressions. I recognized the spiral and felt some frustration and despair over being back in “that place” but let myself stay with the feelings. Giving instruction in class 9, I was more self-conscious than I was at the start, and while able to settle a bit with my partner, I still felt uncomfortable with my process. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Listening to the replay of the class, I was able to really hear and begin to integrate some of what we’d discussed, I was able to trade judgement for curiosity and regain some humor and perspective. I needed the reminding that the importance of this journey and the vulnerability of the role will bring up all kinds of baggage. And that going into deeper territories usually ushers me through a passage of “I don’t know anything.” In this round, I noticed a greater ability to be with my discomfort, and, as I did, a greater ability to be with my non-discomfort and hold both at the same time. I find I’m feeling a deeper awareness and tender connection to this process and what it can become for both teacher and student and I do feel prepared to begin to offer 1:1 instruction.
Ankur!
I think you must teach, remember, I was there 🙂
(ps, I do like the image of the boat, I often think of the technique as an anchor)Well Jo, you’ve certainly described my experience! I hope I can articulate it as well as you’ve done here 🙂
Toni, Yes! Relying on the frame of the technique allows us to move forward as teachers while recognizing the need to continue to be open to learning, perhaps like the strength of the back provides the stability to allow our fronts to soften and open as we take our seat.
Hi Colin,
I liked when Kat reflected that “your intentions are the heart of the matter” and for all your questioning, prehaps because of your questioning, you sound like a teacher I could trustHi Rosie,
I love how you’re describing your practice here and in class and how naturally meditaion teaching can be woven in to your community, and I thank you because it makes me realize that that’s the context I don’t have (yet) and what I want to look out for on whatever turns out to be my beachAs an organizer, I initially struggled with the thought of asking for a membership fee in impoverished neighborhoods but learned quickly that it was honest and respectful to be serious and clear about the money that not only encouraged attendance at first, but set the stage where literally invested community members owned their own path where they developed and directed a group that belonged to them.
In my next work incarnation, as I grew as a psychotherapist and began to transition into private practice, I re-entered the struggle to set a fair fee schedule, recognizing that I was revisiting questions about valuing myself and what I was able to offer. I never was comfortable setting the high fees most of the people I trained with-and trained- have set and I realize that while getting comfortable in their way is not my way, and while my middle way is doing well enough now with more reasonable sliding scale fees and insurance rates, Saturday’s class made me uncomfortably aware that I can also hear the Mamos grumbling that there is more internal work I need to do, (or/and?), as Maho gently pointed out, giving and receiving is a practice.
I am informed by these experiences when I connect with my feelings regarding money and meditation. While mandates of each role share a path to living fully and freely in connection with and commitment to others; and the practice of each role include some questioning about one’s worth and efficacy; the role of meditation teacher is different in many ways. There is a lot to think about when one is considering honoring lineage and dharma as well as how this practice adapts and changes in it’s cultural context here and now. There are further considerations when one finds a when and where to teach and how that forms the frame. But overall, I do think I would choose to charge money for teaching meditation, to loosely quote and honor what many of you talked about in class; attention must be paid for the energy and value exchanged and we must value ourselves and our efforts to learn from and value those who stand behind us and in honor of what we are passing on. A free session, to see if there is a good fit, (or a come on, from the drug dealer perspective), sounds like a good possibility to me, I would also look at a sliding scale with individuals, an agreement if within an organization. I really, really don’t think it should be by donation, I share the conflict this brings up for me as Ankur so succinctly described her experience, and, as, Colin wisely observed, it puts the onus on the student instead of on the teacher and as stumbly as one might feel starting out, okay, as stumbly as I do, it is important to take responsibility for holding the frame in honor of the practice and what it means.Please describe a situation where you had an ideal learning environment. Please describe a less-than-ideal environment from your personal experience
Reading your reflections have added so many layers to how I’m connecting to this topic. I hadn’t thought about early childhood experience until I read Cheryl’s moving essay, and then Colin’s memories with his Dad and Glenn’s with his parents and grandparents. I felt such resonance with Melanie’s reaction to Cheryl’s account when she wrote “there is something so sweet and tender about cooking a recipe or cutting cloth and feeling our parents working through our eyes and hands.” It brought up a memory from my 20’s, a few years after my Dad’s death. During slightly tipsy meal prep with friends, we up- ended and dislodged part of a kitchen cabinet and after some minutes looking at scattered utensils with some dismay, I knelt down and said ‘I think if we do this…’ adding actions to words, and figured it out. Tom asked ‘how’d you learn to do that?’ and at 1st I said ‘I don’t know’ then I looked up at Howard, my tweenhood friend, smiling and tearing up, said, ‘I think I’m channeling my father.’
I’ll always remember a walk down a country lane with my grandfather and how he taught me about individual relationships with the trees.
I certainly shared Marybeth, Colin and Glenn’s negative associations with early formal schooling, although sometimes we lucked out with teachers sometimes and I do bless the friend groups.
Initially, I was planning on centering this essay on my experience in my 4 year analytic training institute because in so many ways it provided the safety and trust that supported the vulnerability for growth (to paraphrase Marybeth’s beautiful comprehensive ideal learning environment description) and also contained that less-than-ideal experience. The way the program was structured and the fine human’s carrying it out provided the container that nurtured development with both compassionate empathy and challenging demands in our work as psychotherapists and as developing psychoanalysts working in supervision, analysis and academic rigor as well as developing a kind and supportive bond among the 7 of us in the training class as we engaged in our work. We 7 traversed a dizzying array of crossed over relationships; my case supervisor conducted a class on Freud and a class on Intersubjectivity, our Object Relations teacher was K’s analyst and G’s analytic case supervisor and so on. We were acutely aware of the triggering opportunities, which I think contributed to how careful we were with each other and how we developed a culture of boundaried closeness which framed the richness of the learning environment. It wasn’t until we were closer to the ending of our time there that we had THE CLASS that was catastrophically less-than-ideal. As experienced and smart and old and analyzed a group as we were; as close and familiar we had become with each other; as surrounded by experienced and concerned institute staff became, nobody figured out how to understand it nor what to do about it until it was well behind us. It cost us one of our number who left for “other” reasons. We learned later that the manner and content of the class and the teacher triggered a history of sexual abuse/abuse of power trauma in one of our number and she and the teacher engaged in a kind of sexualized verbal exchange in which she was so defensively dissociated that identifying it was confusing to all of us and the dissociation was completely catching. I watched each class as we fell like dominos and every damn time I thought, this can’t happen again, this is absurd, and then an energy drain just knocked me out like we were under some spell from a really hostile fairy.
I’ve noticed a through line in some of our accounts; the importance of support and community. I certainly value and delight in it here. Yet I also remember my utter delight in one of my 1st college courses where Professor E would walk in, stand at the lectern, and deliver the class content, in flat, contained and continuous monotone that seemed to hold a whiff of derisive regard. At the end of class, he would close the folder, tuck it under his arm, turn away from us, and walk out. Once I got the hang of listening to him and taking notes, I found, to my surprise, that it felt relieving to be solely engaged in content and have no fawning pressure to “relate.” I think of the experience with amused pleasure these many years later. It makes me realize that there is no one way to understand what is an ideal learning environment. Each of us is different, we respond differently, and our own capacities vary and change, sometime hour to hour. I vary my therapeutic stance depending on the needs of my patients. Sometimes that changes even within a session. On my good days, to quote Susan, I get it (mostly) right or at least pick up where it’s not and open it to inquiry. And now here we are considering how to deeply listen to be best able to provide meditation instruction to whom we may be teaching. Will connecting here to our experiences help us connect to how we might better understand another’s human experience, a starting point perhaps, that might help us make our way into their shoes so we can connect to their experience and best support their discovery? On our good days?Glenn,
What a fasinating account of your work and your becoming!
Further kudos on your cogent description and the calling out of the role of formal schooling in blostering social/political systems that hold authenticity and healthy growth and development hostage.Marybeth,
I loved how beautifully you described the ideal learning environment; “Whenever I feel safe, have trust, and where vulnerability does not bring judgment” and I honor that that was what you had in your wonderful relationship with Terry.Your less-than-ideal example feels like it needs to be banished in a separate comment thread; in my experience, and likely in more than those in the forum that have already commented and resonated with you, continues to live in more traditional education programs, particularly in grade school. Sigh.
Oh Rosie!
I felt claustrophobic just reading your 2nd example! What an awfully understated less-than-ideal experience to go through!I’d like to try this essay again; I know I didn’t really answer the question before, it brought up so much too much for me to feel up to wrangling it into a coherent share. But when I read Rosie’s (thank you Rosie) excellent framing of this question through her psychotherapeutic lens and the reactions to it, it made me realize that I could/should risk the vulnerability to share some of my experiences as a therapist.
In my early therapist days, one of my learning experiences that taught me so much about the role of the use of self in therapy was when I attended a workshop on bias/stereotyping in couple issues. One of the presenters, a gay male therapist, talked about a current assumption that gay men tended to have multiple sexual partners. He spoke about initial development, how we began our relational histories with deep love for our parents and discussed the culturally typical encounter of a boy coming out to a cis father who likely might not understand how to relate to his son and may explicitly and/or implicitly push away from him, teaching the boy that he must divide sex and love, so love can survive, leaving the relationship to sex in a complicated and disconnected state. He then presented his work with a man who was experiencing this split and was experiencing sadness and a lack of fulfillment in his adult relationships and was flirting with the therapist and expressing erotic longings for him. This lovely boundaried therapist was able to embrace the longing by normalizing it and enjoying it with his patient in a framework where they very clearly discussed that this was a relationship where all feelings could be expressed and explored (to process and understand) but not ever a relationship that would develop into an active sexual/romantic relationship. It was through the safety in this relationship that this man was able to free himself of his early illusions about love and sex and begin to engage deeper connection with himself and others.
With my very first patient in my very first job, I was asked if I’d ever used heroin. Now I didn’t stand on ceremony withholding personal information, I knew it was important to understand, in dialog with the patient, the why of the asking and the answering (solicited and unsolicited) was okay in the service of the patient’s journey. If I had processed and was comfortable with the information, I would share, but I only really knew that and acted from it after I’d gained more experience. My immediate thoughts then were how can I “prove” I am a worthy therapist, but I paused, listened and looked at him and said, “you’re asking me if I can understand you?” I was rewarded by a big grin on his face, after which he would ask me various questions from time to time, then laugh and say “you’re not going to tell me are you?” and I would learn to shut up and wait while it led him to deeper questions about himself.
On another initial session, a new patient was talking about his experiences and looked up and asked, “have you ever been depressed?” and when I answered “of course!” he said “oh, good!” and then looked horrified and stumbled to explain it wasn’t that he wanted me to be depressed……and we shared our first belly laugh the was to become the beginning of our therapeutic alliance.During our studies here, I’ve come to think more deeply about the meaning of “container” and I am grateful for it. As I look back on my roles, both as teacher and being taught, I find I am looking back on the aspects of values, mission and commitment that framed the healthiest exchanges that I am now seeing as containers in which the work can happen with the connection that supports growth as well as providing the space of separation that promotes and safeguards students freedom. I’ve been lucky to have many good relationships with teachers and mentors who modeled the kind of boundaried connection that taught me what I wanted to aspire to.
