Credentials
I began teaching a new workshop this week. As I took my place at the head of the large room I gazed with satisfaction over a sea of expectant faces and felt a nagging question form in the back of my mind. Is satisfaction an appropriate attitude? Isn’t that a bit like pride? Am I not supposed to be motivated by pure altruism? Even if I were—which I’m not—how could I even make such a claim?
Setting oneself up as a teacher is quite a move for somone long haunted by the demon of self-doubt. My overt credential is that I was a fully ordained Buddhist monk and received in-depth instruction from a dozen or two Tibetan Buddhist masters, just as theirs was their lineage connection back to the Buddha himself. A more tangible credential though, is that I’ve tried as best I could to use what I learned while living the intervening years of prosperity and failure, joy and tragedy, marriage and parenting.
I postponed my teaching career for two and a half decades pecisely because all I had to go on back in the 1980s was book learning and a bit of meditation in remote retreat locations. I may have felt as spiritual and otherworldly as can be, but was entirely cut off from the everyday realities of the people I wanted to teach. What finally qualified me in my own eyes was the fact that I’d grown more balanced over the years, and have built the inner resources to reformulate the Buddha’s teachings from experience—not just in fancy words and insider jargon but from the inside out. Daily life has challenged my practice in ways that I never imagined when I was living the privileged life of a monk. The people behind all those faces that gaze at me expectantly have to deal with just those challenges too, but without the advantage I had of of being exposed in depth, at a young age, to an extraordinary system of thought and practice. Having all that under my belt during the ups and downs of the intervening years has given my life all the meaning I ever hoped for.
I’m not all that altruistic, though it would be great if I were. I’m not an enlightened being, though I am a lot more alert to my own limitations and illusions than I used to be. I’m comfortable teaching mindful reflection because I’ve been practicing it for thirty-five years, not because I’ve mastered the art of concentration or left behind negative emotions once and for all. I don’t see past lives; I have trouble keeping a clear perspective on this one. Some of the students to whom I’ve explained all this have gasped in disbelief, demanding to know how, if I’m still struggling after thirty-five years, they can ever hope to master the techniques of mindful reflection. Mastery is not the point. The important thing is to continually adjust life’s course. Like a ship at sea, life and its stresses don’t come to a dead stop and abruptly take a new direction. It takes a while to swing the whole thing around and point it to a new horizon. What’s important is to keep checking your course.
This blog will be a record of my hand on the tiller, and will document my failures as well as my successes. It will be an example of mindful reflection in action, and provide you with some first-hand evidence to help you decide whether or not it’s for you.
