In 2016, I started a weekly mindfulness group at work with two colleagues. We pitched the idea, secured a nominal budget, and brought in a certified teacher from a local meditation center to introduce us to meditation. We sat in a conference room, partially cross-legged in restrictive business casual, and felt genuine joy when close to 20 of our coworkers practiced within the walls of our corporate office without a trace of insincerity. We also soon realized that we didn’t have an endless budget to bring in teachers every week. We could run these sessions a few times a year but had to fill the weeks between with our own content. As the yoga teacher of the group, I was asked to share a mindfulness exercise in the next meeting. And my immediate reaction was, “Am I really qualified to do this?” I wasn’t a certified mindfulness or meditation teacher. I admired and respected my own teachers who studied, practiced, embodied, and taught mindfulness over many decades. Teachers play an essential role in preserving and deepening collective wisdom. A good teacher not only guides through their expertise, but they know that the true teachings are found within each one of us and, after a lifetime of trying, erring, and persevering, they know how to create kind space for wisdom to arise. I didn’t have deep expertise. Mostly, I had “trying and erring.” And that made me very similar to my conference room peers. I couldn’t teach mindfulness, but I could share my own experience–just a few years down the road of perseverance. Teaching is like gifting someone your secret recipe (most often through example) and knowing that the best meals are made together. A great teacher makes it possible for you to find your own way around the kitchen, too. They not only guide and connect you to your inner knowing, they learn from you as well. Teachers give us recipes for wisdom that last a lifetime. Sharing is like offering someone the salad bowl at the dinner table. You’re taking the ingredients of the practice that resonate with you, arranging them best you can, and passing it to someone else in case they’d like to try it, too. Sharing is saying “I’m right here next to you, trying the same things you are.” Sharing takes your own big, insightful ideas and breaks them down into understandable, easily communicated bites. It’s not a substitute for a teacher’s expertise, it’s an offering to share your own experience.
The Benefits of Sharing Your Mindfulness Practice
What you share will hopefully benefit someone else, but it will certainly serve you. Sharing mindfulness has several benefits for the sharer:
Deepened understanding: We learn a subject more intimately when we put it into our own words and explain it to someone else. Accountability: When we’re the ones talking about mindfulness and people start to look to us for everyday examples, were more likely to stick to our practice and create more everyday examples.Integration: As we try to describe how mindfulness can help others, we will see more opportunities to apply mindfulness in our own lives.Flexibility: When sharing with others, we immediately see how their needs, experiences, and interpretations differ from ours. It helps us loosen our ideas of how mindfulness has to work, and focus on how it could work.
The call isn’t to replace the expertise of teachers with amateurs, it’s to bring a thoughtful relatability to the micro-moments when we share our practice.
How to Start Sharing Your Mindfulness Practice
Here’s a soft list of questions to explore and things to consider from the team of mindfulness-sharers at my organization. These prompts can help you choose what stories, benefits, and tips you can begin to share from your practice. You can discuss these points in a group or use the prompts for a journaling exercise. We don’t all have to be mindfulness teachers, and we don’t have to water down the wisdom of true teachers by committing to share more than we’re ready to offer. But we still have something to offer when we share our honest experience with others in a way that says, “we’re figuring this out together.”
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Jen Fisher November 17, 2021
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