Tag: relationships

What is Required to be A Mindfulness Meditation Trainer

Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach in a recent video session, Answering the Call, discussed their advanced training for people who want to become certified mindfulness meditation trainers and identified what is required to be a trainer in this area.

Personal prerequisites to become a mindfulness meditation trainer

Tara and Jack discussed a number of prerequisites including heartfelt intention and an experience base to enable sharing realised, personal benefits from mindfulness practice.   To start on this journey, potential meditation trainers must have a genuine desire to share their knowledge, skills and experience for the benefit of others who may be dealing with difficulties in coping with everyday life. So, the starting point is a desire to share in an understanding and compassionate way.

A related prerequisite is experience of daily meditation practice and its benefits.  This is critical as genuine sharing can motivate others.  The experience base of personal meditation practice is essential to be in a position to guide others and respond knowledgably to penetrating questions.

Personal skills and perspectives required for Meditation trainers

It takes courage to set out on this journey, together with trust in your own capabilities to teach meditation practice.  Self-awareness, gained through daily meditation practice, is important to enable you to monitor what you are thinking, feeling and doing and what impact these are having on others. Associated with this, is a willingness to be vulnerable in the course of teaching meditation.   Forgiveness meditation, as taught by Diana Winston, can be very helpful in this regard.

A fundamental skill in any form of coaching or training is the ability to listen for understanding.  Effective listening builds trust and relationships and is a basis for credibility as it demonstrates that you have your “ego” under control, do not push your own agenda and can effectively manage your own emotions.  Listening communicates that you value the relationship, are open to the needs of others and are willing to help them explore possible solutions to problems they are experiencing.

Self-management, then, is critical to become an effective mindfulness meditation trainer.  This extends to issues of money, power and sex.  It is easy to become carried away with the power of influence that you will enjoy (particularly if you do not have your ego under control).  Having unresolved needs can make you more vulnerable to the temptation to misuse your power to gain favours, whether sexual or monetary.  Therefore a strong commitment to ethical practice is essential.

As you grow in mindfulness through your own daily meditation practice, you will develop the desire to share the benefits with others to help them cope with the pressures of modern life.  You will be well placed if you have developed self-awareness and self-management and have a depth of experience to enable sharing in a confident and trusting way.  The process of teaching meditation, in turn, will build your own mindfulness, confidence and trust in your capacity to teach.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of diwou on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

 

Be Brave, Be Creative

In the previous blog post I discussed the need for boldness to take action on a creative idea – to be willing to break with tradition and act on a different way of conceiving something, e.g. Karen Quinlan’s innovations based on a new conception of an art gallery.  I also explained how mindfulness can help us to be bold enough to initiate action on a creative idea – by helping us to build calm, clarity, focus and self-belief.

To sustain creative activity, however, also requires bravery.  It takes courage to explore new terrain, persevere despite setbacks and maintain your energy and enthusiasm when the going gets rough.

Creativity and bravery

Bravery can be defined as “having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty”.   Invariably, there will be setbacks when you set out on a creative endeavour.  For instance, Karen Quinlan found that some gallery directors she approached refused to loan her artwork for her gallery.  However, she was able to persist with her creative ideas and enlist the help of others who supported her ground-breaking ideas.

While Karen was prepared to take risks, like many successful entrepreneurs, she took only calculated risks.  This required considerable research and planning.   Amanda Sinclair explained that Karen, for example, knew that women make up 80-90% of visitors to art galleries in Australia and that very few of the male-dominated, art gallery directors made any effort to satisfy the interests and needs of this demographic group.  So, she was able to draw on her own interests, training and experience to identify these needs and develop creative ways to meet them.

When you encounter a setback, you often cannot see the way forward but you are able to persevere because of your strong belief in the creative idea, its potential contribution and your capacity to see it through to completion.  Mindfulness builds the persistence and resilience required to overcome difficulties and fears along the way even when the way ahead is becoming increasingly unclear.

As you progress your creative ideas and implement your new approach, you will encounter increased resistance from those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  Reg Revans, the father of action learning, who met considerable opposition to his creative approach throughout his life, quoted the German philosopher Nietzsche to explain how new ideas are opposed:

If you think you have a new idea, see what happens.  Unless it is opposed by the stupid and ridiculed by the clever, it can have nothing new in it.

In the face of this kind of irrational and emotive opposition, you need support to sustain yourself and your energy.  Karen was able to gather a creative team to support the development and implementation of her ideas.  This collaboration helped her to maintain motivation, develop creative solutions to problems encountered and build external support.  Karen found, as often is the case, that local businesses came on board with her ideas with cross-promotions when they started to see the increase in tourist traffic and international acceptance and accolades for the Bendigo Art Gallery being developed by Karen.

Bravery and mindfulness

Mindfulness helps you to be more conscious of, and grateful for, the internal and external support you receive and to develop the relationships involved through awareness, empathetic listening and loving kindness.

Mindfulness develops calm and clarity in the face of stressors that would undermine confidence or cloud your vision.  It helps you to strengthen the courage of your convictions, overlook sustained opposition of fearful people, build resilience and develop new ways around roadblocks and impediments to the way forward.  As you grow in mindfulness, you become braver in the pursuit of creative ideas and less fearful of the risks, dangers and difficulties involved.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of johnhain on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

The Power of Awareness

In an interview with Tami Simon, Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach share their insights on The Power of Awareness to Change Your Life.   In exploring these ideas, I will be building on my previous post based on Albert Flynn DeSilver’s ideas about developing mindfulness and awakening through writing.

Jack & Tara have developed together an online course on The Power of Awareness Mindfulness Training.   They each bring to the training discussion and resources, more than 40 years of experience in mindfulness and awareness practice and training .

The first question that exercises your mind when you hear about what Jack and Tara offer is, “What is awareness?”  It is not something that can be accessed by definition or thought alone, because it is an experience of a stillness within, a quiet place that precedes thought and sensation.  It’s that realisation that you, the whole person – not a part of you – is aware of your thoughts and sensations as you are experiencing them.  As Tara explains:

Awareness is the silence that’s listening to the thoughts or listening to the sound; it’s more prior to any of the felt experience through our senses…And you can begin to intuit that there is a space of knowing that is always here and that we are not always aware of it, but it’s here.

That is why The Awareness Training is highly experiential with guided exercises and personal journaling to make explicit the learning and develop deeper insights.

In summarising the ideas presented in this interview, I have identified two key areas that manifest the power of awareness.

Sense of self – changing the narrative

Both Jack and Tara shared what was happening for them prior to awareness training.  They discussed their negative thoughts and the stories they told themselves which served to diminish who they actually were and what they were capable of.   They spoke of the constraints of their own narrative and the expectation entrapment that locked them into particular patterns of thinking and behaviour.

They see awareness as creating freedom from habituated denigration of self and the realisation of a real sense of self and creative capacity.   They maintain that through developing awareness, we can change our self-deprecating narrative, as we step back from our thoughts and perceptions and allow our true selves to emerge.

Relationship building

As we grow in mindfulness and awareness, we are better able to identify and manage the space between stimulus and response.  We gain a deep insight into what we bring to a relationship and the associated conflicts – we become more aware of our habituated responses in a conflict situation.  We gain a clearer realisation of our self-talk, our tendency to defensiveness, our self-protection born of childhood experiences and our inattentiveness when experiencing conflicted emotions.

Added to this self-awareness, is a clarity about our projections and assumptions about the other person and their behaviour, increased capacity to pay attention to the other person and an openness to their needs and perceptions.

Awareness enables us to deepen our relationships, as it frees us from habituated thoughts and responses and opens up the capacity to listen empathetically and respond creatively.

So, as we grow in mindfulness and awareness, we discover our true self and its potentiality and are able to deepen our relationships through a stronger sense of self and a heightened sensitivity towards the other person in the relationship.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of  johnhain on Pixabay