(ambient music)
- With a question like that,
there's often two things that we can do with it.
One, they're like hearing from someone like me
or hearing from someone else,
just like how we've gone through it.
And even just like
that someone else kind of gave themselves permission
or felt empowered to teach early on,
can be like, oh, I can do that too,
which can be really useful.
And then other times it might be a deeper inner exploration
that we end up having to do around where we feel
some of those emotional blocks,
around like who am I to step into a teaching role.
So there may be a combination of both here,
but I'll give you some of how I thought about that early on.
So for what it's worth, I started teaching probably,
well, before I should have been teaching
and before I was qualified to teach.
I've always been a person that does that.
I get interested in something
and then I quickly just want to share it with everyone.
And I just do, and then I asked for forgiveness
rather than permission.
And mindfulness was no different.
I thought I discovered something,
the first time I could watch my thoughts
and not be caught in them.
Nobody had ever told me about that.
So I thought I like invented this or that...
Little did I know that this has been going out
for thousands of years.
And I quickly wanted to share it.
So,
within a few months. I was running a group in college.
I created the Mind, Body, Health and Stress Reduction Club.
Almost as soon as I found benefit in the meditation,
I had already created a Facebook group.
And then three months later,
10% of the college population was part of that group
and I was teaching meditations daily.
And a lot of it
was just coming from reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's book,
Full Catastrophe Living
and doing my own practice
and just taking what I felt was working for me
and offering it to other people.
I didn't have any understanding of the nuances
of working with trauma at that point,
different personality structures
and really anything, just in a general sense.
And I didn't hurt anyone
and ended up doing a lot of good for the people
that were coming.
One thing I did appreciate about
how I went about that at that time
was that I didn't overstep my expertise.
I was very comfortable sharing when I didn't know something
and bringing people into the collective exploration,
which I think is absolutely essential
when we were first starting out
and as we continue with teachers.
The humility to be able to say, I don't know,
is one of actually counterintuitively
the greatest ways that you can establish a credibility
and trust as a mindfulness teacher.
It's a rare thing, becoming less rare these days
in the world of personal development.
And Brene Brown has helped make a lot of strides with this,
but just being able to acknowledge
where the limits
of what you can offer expertise wise might be.
And then that is a teaching of the teachings itself.
It's an embodiment of the teachings.
An ability to fully own what you do know
and what you don't know.
So you can teach with all of that
because the reality is the deeper you go into this,
the more you realize just how much you don't know.
(laughs)
And the first month of teaching meditation,
I thought I could take Jon Kabat-Zinn's job.
I got back from Burma and I was like,
man, I can't teach until I go
in a cave for another 10 years.
So,
there's that one...
I forgot what the phrase is.
But just that the deeper we go into something,
the more ignorant we realize we are.
And I think holding that at the beginning
and all the way through is very helpful.