Wk2-15 Batchelor - mindfulness teachers
Well I think that teachers obviously have an enormous responsibility. And I feel that in order to really act responsibly in this area, he or she, the teacher, first needs to really get a good, clear understanding of how mindfulness is used in a Buddhist context and how it is used outside a Buddhist context. But again, that sounds simpler than in fact it is. Because the Buddhist context at some level blurs into the psychotherapeutic context. Any number of people I know who had been Buddhist monks that got in started doing meditations, let's say, vipassana meditation, and they hit up against unresolved psychological stuff from their childhood or whatever. So they are somehow necessarily drawn to work with this psychotherapeutic material in a Buddhist religious context, because that's what they're doing. That's where they are. They have no other way of looking at it. Turn the equation on it's head. You have people who go in to do mindfulness in a purely secular therapeutic environment. And let's say they going to deal with their relapse into depression or something like that. And yet, once they experience the stillness and the clarity of mindfulness, that opens up a space in which larger questions in their lifestyle to be allowed to come forth. They realize that this mindfulness is not just a strategy for homing in on one particular problematic area of my life, they realize that it's a strategy that they could apply to all different areas of their existence. They might find that they actually enjoy this quality of still, centered attention. They might find that that actually leads them to ponder questions that otherwise would be called religious. So you have it going back and forth both ways. And so, I think the teacher of mindfulness has to be aware not only of the distinctive realms, Buddhism, therapy, religion, therapy, but also the experiences that students have from both sides of this scenario. That bring them into touch with aspects of mindfulness that might have not have been remotely what they were interested in the outset, but the practice somehow leads them to. So it's really I think a question of getting as much background experience and background knowledge as one can. Being utterly honest with the student, but again, there's no quick sort of little ten word formula that I can come up with that will somehow provide an answer to the question, well, how do I respond to this question? It's not going to be easy necessarily.
