Wk2-13 Kuyken - who should teach
My view is that in, first of all, I think I'm sure there are many different views on this and I wouldn't want to claim any to be right. My view is, if the very best Buddhist teachers have had an extensive training in what they do, they have really understood the Buddhist texts. They have been trained in the dharma. They have gone through a rigorous process of training in relation to their own minds of knowing their minds, training their minds, transforming their minds, tasting the liberative power of practice and then, they've gone through another process. I'm thinking about the very best Buddhist teachers, of being mentored to be a teacher by a senior teacher. And once they've been mentored to be a teacher, they are then released to become a teacher in their own right. So there is this sort of lineage of training in the kind of Buddhist dharma world, which I think is quite separate and different to the lineage of training to be an MBCT teacher. So the lineage of training to be an MBCT teacher is that someone develops, so, take MBCT for depression. They have a sort of clinical qualification to work with whatever population they're going to work with, in whatever setting they're going to work with, so let's say that's mental health, and in a health care context. They then are asked to, from a science theory point of view, understand MBCT. Maybe read the manual, attend some lectures, attend some workshops. In parallel, they are asked to start to establish that they've not already, a mindfulness practice. With guidance, so they can begin. But they will be, some 10, 30, 40 years, behind those mindfulness teachers. But they're on a different path, right? And then, through that kind of training journey, they've developed their mindfulness practice, they then go through an eight week MBCT class as a participant. Continually invited to turn off, that kind of what's happening here, actually experience it from the inside out. Then, they learn to teach the MBCT classes, first on their peers, and then in the apprenticeship model. And then the NBI tech comes in up here. So they've now been through that whole pathway and they've started to work as an apprentice, and then somebody independent looks at their teaching. Now these, the way I've described it, these are two completely different parts. So maybe just tell you a story about seven and a half years ago, Christina Feldman and I, Decided to establish a masters program in mindfulness based cognitive therapy at the University of Exeter. Now Christina is a very senior mindfulness teacher. In fact, I think Jon Kabat-Zinn was on retreat with her when he had the idea to develop MBSR. And she was one of the early people with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salsberg who were some of the originators of the idea of bringing the passing of contemporary Buddhism to the West. And I was a young clinical scientist, clinical psychologist, and we started to teach and we stood on our own ground. Christina stood on the ground of being a dharma teacher and a Buddhist teacher, and I stood on the ground of being an MBCT teacher. By the third cohort, we were swapping places. But it took six years. What I mean by that was we would be teaching and in the early cohort, Christina would say, give me an example from an MBCT class of, for example, dependent origination. And I'd give them from a patient who had been in one of my recent classes. By the third cohort, Christina would be saying, I'm supervising somebody who's teaching MBCT and here's something that she told me. And I'd say, yes, but there's a sutta in the Pali canon that actually is really relevant and interesting. But I had then gone through an 18 month training program called the Committed Dharma Practitioner Program. So I had really deepened my own practice in understanding Buddhist psychology, but that, to come back to your question, was a very long journey. [LAUGH] Well, I think a rather separate journey for both of us at coming together, and then a six years of really understanding one another's perspectives. And I think there are a very small set of people in the MBCT world who really understand the dharma world. And there are a very small group of people in the dharma world who really understand the MBCT world. But those people are so, in my opinion, enormously valuable because there is such a fascinating and such an important kind of confluence, I think, at that place.
