3 Nutrients You Need to Grow as a Meditation Teacher
3 Nutrients You Need to Grow as a Meditation Teacher
By Acharya Satyam Ehinger
Being a meditation teacher is like growing a garden, if you can provide it with water, sunshine and a healthy eco system then you will have an abundant harvest. That harvest is what you give to your community, they become your ‘teachings’. We all want an abundant harvest from our gardens, but it can help to step back and really look at how we can support our growth as a meditation teacher in order to ensure this garden keeps producing year after year.
So let’s take a moment to talk about growing as a meditation teacher, and see what nutrients we need to provide ourselves in order to produce the teachings that we give our students.
Every garden needs these three essentials to produce a harvest:
Water: Daily Personal Practice
Sunshine: Attend classes
Eco System: Collaboration with fellow yogis
You know more about this than you realize. For example, if you are a yoga teacher you probably already do all of these things to help your garden of yoga produce the harvests of your classes. Now we just have to recognize this process and apply it to our meditation teaching.
1. Water it with your Personal Practice
Every garden needs water, and even more importantly, it needs to be watered regularly. Not alot all at once, and then nothing for a long time— a daily steady supply is essential. To a yoga teacher this is obvious, you have to have a regular personal yoga practice that really benefits you, for a meditation teacher this simply means you have to have a regular meditation practice. We all have our own unique capacities at each stage of our sadhana, so how long and often each of practices will change throughout your life, but the only thing that will never change, as Patanjali wrote nearly 2,000 years ago, is that only “Regular, whole-hearted application over time will create a foundation whereby the practice is firmly integrated” (YS,1.14). This was also echoed by Swami Rudrananda just 40 years ago when he taught, “Effort over time equals growth”. There is simply no substitute for a steady meditation practice if you seek to teach meditation. Shambhavananda Yoga recommends meditating twice daily, once in the morning before you start your day and once in the evening. Eventually it is ideal to work up to 30 minutes for each session, but that may be something you have to build up to.
Your daily meditation practice is by far the most essential nutrient you need for sustaining yourself as a practitioner and growing into a fruitful teacher. If we had to put it into a ratio, you could say that meditation comprises 92% of your work as a meditator, and the other 8%, contains essential vitamins that are critical to supporting you as a meditation teacher. Another way of saying it might be: Not every meditator needs to teach, but every meditation teacher needs to meditate. So if you want to be a meditation teacher you gotta do both, the 92% and the extra 8%, which is the remainder of this presentation. For a meditation teacher, the other 8% becomes essential in it’s own way, which is why we are going to spend some time now discussing what that 8% looks like.
So just for the record, if you only have 30 minutes set aside for your practice every morning you should spend at least 25 minutes of it actually meditating, and the extra 5 minutes can be spent reading, writing, or discussing that practice as we are about to describe.
Beyond a personal meditation practice we must also have a personal philosophy practice, let me explain why. Teaching yoga isn’t just about doing yoga, for example, it’s also about studying yoga. Reading an article on an aspect of your yoga practice is always inspiring and generates material of your classes, and meditation is just the same— essays on meditation are called philosophy, Sutras, commentaries, satsangs, and so on.
“Self-study”, ie. studying by your self, is the time you spend one-on-one with a sacred text or satsang text, connecting with it at a deep and intuitive level. You can’t re-read a section of text 2, 3, or 4 times in a group, but you can by yourself, and sometimes it’s only on the fourth time that it clicks. Self study has also be shown to be the most paramount learning method by leaps and bounds when it comes to academic pursuits, and these presentations are no exception. Self study is where the magic happens.
Similarly to yoga, there are literally endless articles and resources you can turn to for information, but more isn’t always better. It is actually a scientific fact that when faced with too many choices we tend to shut down and choose none of them— that’s why Costco only picks two products of each category to sell, really! Lineage teachers have also said that when you take from many different traditions you can create what’s called "psychic indigestion”, like mixing all the spices from your spice rack into one dish— it usually just makes your stomach hurt. Not to say it can’t be done, it just requires true precision and mastery to accomplish a “fusion” level restaurant experience. In the beginning it’s best to simplify your resources so that you can dig deeply and be nourished.
2. Shine light on your garden by attending classes:
You can feel the radiance of the sun when it shines on your skin, like plants we can drink it in and grow. For most you teachers it’s assumed that you would take time to be supported by the radiance of fellow teachers by going to a yoga class regularly, but that is not as easy to come by for meditation teachers. This is why Shambhavananda Yoga offers a bi-weekly Thursday night presentation program by gifted teachers who are honing their meditation teaching craft, just like you. It’s also why we spend so much time listening to each others presentations during our meditation teacher training. Even if it’s not technically or academically perfect, the knowledge we gain by watching our peers is truly priceless and reaches us in a way that no book ever could.
3. Nourish your garden with an Ecosystem of collaboration with fellow meditators
Mono harvesting is a tough trade, it’s much easier to sustain a garden if you have diversity in your garden, a healthy eco system of fellow veggies all reaching for the light together. Really passionate teachers or professionals in any modality often get together in small groups to talk about their work and discuss insights they are having in it. An open forum for discussion is a fundamental part of really refining your craft— most of us are used to doing this in online text-based forums, which can be a little intimidating and vulnerable. To accommodate meditation practitioners and teachers, Shambhavananda Yoga has a live-online bi-weekly class for practitioners to meet up and work together on un-packing ancient abstract texts in a fun, safe and supportive atmosphere, guided by experienced teachers. It’s called “Studhi Buddhi”, (a word-play on the yogic word Buddhi which means Intellect), and is an amazing resource to help you keep working with texts and trying to put your experiences into words.
These three essential nutrients might seem obvious in the realm of teaching yoga, or even if you wanted to become a better cook, or writer— but for many it’s a very new perspective on the practice of teaching meditation. I hope that by taking a moment to look at them from this perspective, and to see the ways that each nutrient is available to you in Shambhavandna Yoga, that you can begin to nourish the garden of your practice and be on your way to an abundant harvest on the path of teaching meditation.