Teaching Methods • Letting Go to Let it Flow: The Practice of Surrender while Teaching Meditation

The practice of releasing doership and teaching as a form of service is a profound act of surrender, allowing the teachings to flow through you without obstruction. To facilitate this flow, it is essential to 'empty your cup,' as illustrated in the classic Zen story, “empty your cup”, and echoed in Faith Stone’s Kirtan lyrics, “You Gotta Let it Go if you Want it To Flow.” This concept teaches that while we strive to perform well in teaching, the attachment to this goal can itself become the obstacle, obstructing our creative and spiritual flow, leading us away from our true center. This essay concludes with two practical ways of accomplishing that within your next teaching scenario, so that you can feel for yourself that by repeatedly detaching from outer impressions and embracing teaching as a service, we allow a higher wisdom to flow through us, benefiting both our students and our spiritual growth.

The practice of releasing doership and teaching as a form of service is practice of surrender, of getting out of the way and allowing the teachings to flow through you. To do this you have to make room for the flow, you have to ‘empty your cup’ as the classic zen story teaches it. “NAN-IN, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!” “Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Emptying your cup is more than a metaphor, it is a very real part of teaching from inside. As Faith Stone sings in a kirtan album by Shiva’s Garden, “You Gotta Let it Go if you Want it To Flow”, referring to the yogic concept that a teacher must let go or empty their cup in order to allow a higher force to flow through to their students. Because even though we all want to do a great job when teaching, this need can itself become the very thing that pulls us away from our center—blocking our creative flow and preventing us from teaching to our highest potential. We ‘play ourselves’, as the Malinivijaya Tantra teaches, letting the rich energy of a teaching atmosphere flow into our worries instead of our hearts.

To avoid this common pitfall, the Sutras teach, we must use our practice to repeatedly ‘detach from these outer impressions’ throughout the teaching process, not just at the beginning and end of our practice as we say ‘namaste’, but throughout the center of our practice. As the Malinivijaya Tantra teaches, “Due to the impressions they have of what others think of them or expect from them and of their desire to help others, to satisfy them with boons, the yogi may lose their temper and become careless and uneven-minded, blocking their flow of God consciousness… So, although they are aware of God consciousness in the beginning and in the end, they are played by this universe in the center, played by hunger, played by thirst, played by every aspect of daily life. Therefore, the one who desires to achieve the highest being should not be attached to these outer impressions.”

The Practice of ‘Teaching from inside’ is how we do that, how we detach from these outer impressions in order all our creative flow to not only serve our students, but our own spiritual growth, ensuring that the energy of our teaching classrooms flows through us, and doesn’t just stop at us. As the tantra teaches, this is something that occurs in the midst of our teaching experience— ie. No matter how centered we are when we start teaching, we have to be willing to come back to our practice throughout the experience, over and over and over again. This is the practice of letting go of our small self in order for the a deeper wisdom to flow through. There is no doubt that we have to do the work of preparing for our class, and there is a lot of mental effort during class to remember our sequence and affiliated cues— but as a yogi we take on the ‘triple awareness’, the work of not only preparing but also surrendering, in order to feel what’s real for you in the present.

One way to do this is by shifting our approach to teaching the feeling that you are the one giving the teachings, towards the feeling of sharing the teachings you have received as service. When you start to see teaching as service, it allows you to simply offer what you have been given, and to release the burden of doership that so often follows us onto the teaching mat.

This expanded capacity is what sets the stage for real magic of teaching yoga, as Sri ShambhavAnanda teaches in the following quote.

“Tremendously serving others is one of the highest practices you can do. So how do you do that? You don’t teach with a vengeance. You don’t teach with anger. You don’t teach with tension.Instead you open your heart and you let go of your little self. You surrender and you allow the energy to flow. Then wonderful energy and deep wisdom can come through you. If you are trying to teach from a textbook, or if you are trying to teach from some rules that you read somewhere, other efforts are meaningless. But when you teach from the heart, when you open up and you gather in the spiritual energy from your connection, then it not only benefits others, but it also benefits you. The things that I hear coming out of my mouth sometimes shock me, because they are not coming from my mind.”

In order to help you empty your cup while teaching, we would like you to incorporate a simple yet effective breathing practice into your presentation. It’s called “Centered Breathing”, and is basically the practice of using two natural breaths to empty your mind and fill your heart. This technique helps us dissolve the mental script we all carry with us when teaching and re-find our personal experience within the present.

To do the centering breath, start with hands at the heart. Inhale, lift the hands overhead and keep them together. Exhale as you separate the hands, turning the palms out, and lower them slowly to the ground— this is the moment of emptying the mind. Turn the palms back up and inhale as you scoop the arms up overhead and together— this is the moment of filling your heart. With your last exhale, let the hands glide down to the heart at center, pulling your mind and attention within. The entire centering breath is 2 full breaths long: Inhale up from the heart, exhale down to the floor. Your second inhale takes your arms up, and your second exhale brings your hands down to the heart. In our experience of teaching this centering breath over the years it has been common for students to either rush through the breath, or to extend them to extremely long proportions— neither is optimal. To help with this challenge we now incorporate a mantra with the breath flow.

Multiple peer reviewed scientific studies have concluded that an optimal length for breathing is about 5.5 seconds in, and 5.5 seconds out. The mantra “Na-mah Shi-va-ya” is 5 syllables, so repeating this one syllable per second as you float and lower the arms is a great way of not only ensuring you are breathing optimally, but also focusing the mind on your mantra. Pausing in between the breaths to repeat ‘Om’ silently to yourself can help you feel the pause, and give you that last half second of breath flow. When the arms, the breath, the mantra and inner focus come together— the centered breath can have a tremendous effect on your experience of teaching. For this exercise, take one centered breath before teaching and one centered breath after teaching, to ensure that we are bringing our best practice to the experience. Don’t teach the breath, just take the breath— it’s for you to get a glimpse of what’s possible when we really center while teaching.

As the Tantra taught earlier, just practicing at the beginning and end may not be enough— we have to bring our practice to the center of our experience of the posture as well. For this reason, your assignment is to literally write in two time within your presentation text “(Take Centering Breath Here)”. At those two junctures in your presentation you will allow the world to ‘pause’ around you as you take a centering breath. Please don’t teach the centering breath out loud, this defeats the purpose of you accessing your breath. Just take that small moment in time to connect directly with your breath, your mantra, and the intention of emptying your mind and filling your heart. Then simply continue presenting, no need to talk slower or take an elaborate pause, let the breath do the work.

One last thing: Nose Breathing

We would also like to add one more aspect to the assignment this week that will allow you to keep your focus inside, slow down, and teach from the heart and the present— and that is nose breathing. As you have already read, the benefits of nose breathing are tremendous for our body, and perhaps more importantly in this scenario, for our mind. Nose breathing slows our breath down, activates our diaphragm, and down regulates our nervous system. If you can nose breathe while you teach, you can be sure you are relaxed, present and focused.

That being said, nose breathing while teaching is a long term goal. There are many factors that make this a difficult goal, so go easy here. Just having it as a goal is a great start. To aid you in making this possible it is essential to practice nose breathing while talking. This can be hard in a social setting, but privately is totally possible. To do so, simply read a paragraph from a book out loud, breathing only through your nose while you do so. This will begin to show you the pace of speaking while nose breathing, as well as build your tolerance physiologically for the possibility while you teach. Reading out loud while nose breathing twice a day for the next week will be a great boost to your potential.

So to Recap, Your Teaching Methods Assignment :

Write your essay as usual for this week, and literally write into it two times “(Take a Centering Breath Here)”. Take the breath while you are teaching, not rushing, and not teaching it, but truly using it to center and relax.
Read a paragraph from a book out loud 2x a day for the next week— breathing only through your nose while you do. Pay attention to the internal experience of it, as well as the pace. Try to bring this into your experience of teaching to the best of your ability, but be compassionate with yourself as this is a long term goal.

Recap & Reflect:

“Letting Go to Let it Flow: The Practice of Surrender while Teaching Meditation” explores the practice of releasing doership and embracing teaching as a form of service, emphasizing the need to 'empty your cup' to allow a higher wisdom to flow through you, and offers practical techniques like centered breathing and nose breathing to help achieve this state during meditation teaching.

Reflect on a recent experience where you felt your need to "do a great job" in teaching or another activity became an obstacle. How might applying the concept of "emptying your cup" have changed the outcome or your experience in that situation?

KonalaniMay 20, 2024Comment