How to Teach Mindfulness and Meditation | Part 1 - Compassion
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- All right, hi, welcome everyone. My name is Sean Fargo. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today we're gonna be introducing a new four-part series on how to teach mindfulness and meditation with confidence and credibility. I'm gonna be going over some tips and tricks and techniques that I've been using for the last 15 years in teaching mindfulness to chronic pain patients,

CEOs, kids, stressed out professionals, you name it. I've been teaching at retreat centers, I've been teaching courses, teaching people how to teach mindfulness for a long time. And so I wanna share with you some of the things that I've learned over the years to help increase my impact and influence to really help others to be more mindful

more self-compassionate and resilient. So I hope that you like and enjoy this four-part series. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out, leave a comment or a review. We'd love to hear from you, but our main intention here is to really help you to help others because the world is going through a lot these days and we all need help, including ourselves.

It takes a village. So here to support you in any way that I can. And hopefully that you find these teachings helpful and practical for helping others to be more mindful. All right. So are you ready to begin this training on how to teach mindfulness and share it with others? Mindfulness is

is just gentle awareness of our moment-to-moment experience, allowing us to notice our unfolding thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judging them to be good or bad, right or wrong. We're not trying to get anywhere or force any outcomes. We're simply being present with what is.

whether it's pleasant or not. Mindfulness meditation is usually a more formal way of cultivating this same awareness. Practices include mindfulness of breathing, the body scan, mindfulness of walking, mindful eating. There's formal self-compassion practice, et cetera. Mindfulness helps us to develop a deeper connection to this very moment.

and fosters a sense of inner calm and clarity. Thousands of clinical studies show that mindfulness improves mental health, emotional health, focus and concentration, physical health, self-awareness, workplace wellness,

and personal relationships. Let's start with the first key aspect of teaching mindfulness with confidence and credibility. So from 2006 to 2009, I lived in Thailand and China. I was working in a job that I thought I would like, but I was feeling really burned out, working way too hard seven days a week on the other side of the world, doing something that didn't fully align with my values, searching for ways to find clarity,

purpose. I stumbled upon an old Taoist hermit. He barely spoke any English. Our first meeting, he made us tea and we sipped in silence for about an hour or so. I stared at my tea, didn't really talk. I

And then I left. Our second meeting, we walked slowly in figure eights through an old forest grove, again in silence. There was not a lot of teaching through words, but there was more of a teaching through presence. What I learned, like meditation,

secrets that he's accumulated over the years being a hermit. So in our third meeting, we sat on the ground and he asked me to count my exhales from one to 10, back from 10 to one, and then just keep cycling through. And I thought that would be simple enough. And if I would lose track, I should start back at one. And to my surprise, I couldn't even make it to 10. My mind was so distracted. I

I had a lot of energy in my body and I couldn't even make it from one to 10. And I thought, if this is so simple, why is it so difficult for me to do this? That seems like the simplest thing in the world. On our fourth meeting, he asked me to sit on a cushion for 30 minutes, close my eyes and simply sense into my body breathing. So I began by feeling my belly rise and fall, rise and fall.

Beyond that, I was resisting feeling anything else in my body since I felt scared to feel the stress I had been accumulated from working too much. After 10 minutes, my legs were on fire. I had never sat cross-legged before on a cushion. After 15 minutes, my body wanted to burst.

Just from all this pressure I had in my body and kind of sensing within. After 20 minutes, I began judging. And after 30 minutes, way rang a bell, making the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard. Because it meant that the meditation was finally over.

and I could move my body. But then I looked into Wei's eyes, and they were the eyes of a wise grandfather who knew the difficulty of what I just went through, especially with my first time. He looked at me as if to say, I'm proud of you. It takes great courage to look within and be with yourself for a little while.

Then something clicked in me. The difficulty was part of the practice. It wasn't supposed to be easy all the time. It was supposed to be revealing. And for that meditation and all future meditations I did with him, he didn't ask me to pretend everything's okay or to get to a calm place or to find bliss. He simply asked me to sense into each moment's experience.

within my window of tolerance, to surrender to what's here, to breathe with it, to be mindful of it, to not judge it to be good or bad, right or wrong, to notice

how it actually is, and to let go of the resistance and the fighting with what's here, and to see that discomfort isn't wrong or bad. It's just a part of our human experience that tends to dissolve when we bring this gentle, spacious, kind awareness to it. So Wei knew it was so simple, yet so difficult sometimes, which is why he treated me with a sense of compassion.

I'm proud of you. It takes great courage to look within. And this compassion that he treated me with was suddenly teaching me how to be compassionate with myself, which is this underlying foundation of all good mindfulness teachers and teachings, a sense of compassion. This was something brand new to me that I didn't learn at home or at school, where there's a lot of judgment and a lot of

thought and behavior that tries to get to an outcome. It's always doing something to get something or to be someone. So practicing the sense of self-compassion with what's here, even in the difficulty, gave way his own sense of peace and his power and his sense of self-compassion because he knew that he could be with anything

as it arose with a sense of care. And so I thought, you know, this is what I want for myself, this sense of peace,

This sense of self-agency and power, this confidence to be able to meet anything as it is, this sense of compassion. And whenever that day comes, hopefully it's in a hundred years from now, I will die a happy soul. So I started wondering how I could do that. I don't know how long I have to live.

every day is a blessing. And so, I thought, you know, I want to do this now because I don't know how long I have to cultivate this practice. Wei said that I can practice this full-time as a hermit or as a monk, kind of like him. So, after several months of sensing into this preposterous idea, I actually thought maybe I should try it, become a hermit or a monk and

And so after a while, I gave away all my possessions, shaved off what little hair I had left, gave my parents a huge hug, found new teachers who had the same compassionate eyes as Wei, and I entered a Buddhist monastery that would take someone like me and train me for what could be the rest of my life.

I had no idea how long I would be there. And so the underlying foundation of all mindfulness teachings that are effective is this sense of compassion. Here's how you can use it today. You can highlight and model the three ingredients of compassion and self-compassion. Kindness versus judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and a sense of presence with the unfolding experience

experience versus over-identifying with anyone. You can also debunk the seven myths of compassion. A lot of people have these myths of what self-compassion is and what compassion is, including compassion will undermine

my motivation. It means letting myself off the hook. It's just feeling sorry for myself. It's self-indulgent. It's the same as self-esteem. It's selfish or it will make me look weak or soft. You can also help people increase their compassion through a guided practice.

Listing memories that bring up feelings of frustration, sadness, fear, stress. Rate each memory on a scale of one to 10 in terms of intensity. Sort them into the mild, intermediate, and intense reactions. Recall one of the mild memories as vividly as you possibly can. Segway into feeling the felt bodily, physical experience of that emotion.

in this moment. Discern between the physical sensations of the emotion and the stories and thoughts and judgments about it. Noticing the judgments of good or bad, right or wrong. Softening the judgments with curiosity. Breathe and try to be with the felt experience more and more. And then after that, continue with the other myopathy

memories after having some trauma sensitivity training, which we'll review soon. But this helps to increase your ability to be with intense situations with more care and curiosity, presence, and being able to sense into how it actually feels without getting lost in the story. And this supports your own practice and your ability to teach others how

how to be with more and more intense situations. You can also invite people to consider how mindfulness and compassion overlap. So mindfulness is this gentle moment-to-moment awareness, while compassion is mindfulness plus common humanity and kindness. So in some ways, we can talk about mindfulness and compassion as two separate things, but really at the heart of it

there's a lot of parallels, a lot of similarities. So when we bring mindfulness to our

or stress or discomfort, there's inherently a sense of gentleness, which is a part of self-compassion. So as mindfulness practitioners, we're practicing self-compassion, which is a simple sense of care for ourselves during the unpleasant moments of our life, whether it's in meditation or not. And as mindfulness teachers, a big part of our role is

is encouraging courage to meet what's here. A heartfelt effort for people to be with whatever they're actually feeling without trying to force it to be a certain way. Reminding them it's okay to feel what we feel.

And that's why I think the hallmark of all good mindfulness teachers is a sense of compassion for others, because we know how scary it can be, how difficult it can be to open to this raw experience of life. So I'm curious, what were some of your takeaways from this first episode on these key aspects of teaching mindfulness? I hope that you found some useful tools and techniques that will help you to help others be more present, self-compassionate,

and resilient. But we're just getting started. We have a few more of these episodes. The next episode is going to be on imposter syndrome, fear of judgment, feeling unworthy to be a mindfulness teacher. So we're going to talk about that very common and understandable feeling that we all have when we're trying to help others be present.

And we're going to be going through some practical and useful tips on how to overcome those feelings and also how we can prepare ourselves to teach mindfulness with integrity. So please be on the lookout for the next episode. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of this episode. Leave a review, leave a comment, drop us a line and let us know how we

Are you applying some of these techniques and tools? What questions do you have? Do you want further support in applying these mindfulness teaching tools to your own personal situation? Let us know. We're here to support you. So as always, we wish you well. Please continue to deepen your own mindfulness practice as you also prepare to help others. As always, if you're wanting to certify to teach mindfulness,

you can come to our website, mindfulnessexercises.com slash certify, where you can learn how to become a certified mindfulness meditation teacher in about 80 hours of personal meditation practice, study, and teaching. So thanks again for listening. My name is Sean Fargo, and I hope to see you again soon. Thank you very much.