Confessions of an Anxious Meditation Teacher

In my role as a meditation teacher I often feel like people don't get a chance to know the real me. They see a curated persona who speaks with a calming tone of voice, someone who spent two years living in a Buddhist monastery and has written two books on meditation and spiritual life. I can imagine those things might give them certain misleading ideas about me.

Behind that persona, the truth is that I struggle a lot with anxiety. I don't mean regular garden-variety anxiety, I mean the kind that I see a doctor about, the kind that has a diagnostic code in the DSM-V. Anxiety is something I have experienced for most of my life, going back to childhood. It can flare up along with insomnia to affect my sleep, my relationships, and my work. Many people might never suspect this about me, because I'm good at keeping it under wraps and showing the outside world an exterior facade of calmness and serenity.

I've been practicing and teaching meditation for 16 years, and while I can say truthfully that meditation helps me regulate my anxiety and work with it more skillfully, I cannot truthfully tell you that meditation cures it. Meditation alone, practiced in solitude, doesn't address the underlying structural issues in my personal psychology. I stopped expecting the practice to do that for me quite a while ago.

I share this confession because in the world of yogis and meditators and people walking various kinds of modern spiritual paths, there's a pervasive misconception that anyone who's been practicing for a while — and especially anyone who has stepped up from practicing into the role of teaching -- is supposed to have it all together.

In my observation, and in my own personal experience, nothing could actually be further from the truth. And this misconception creates some really toxic dynamics between teachers and students.

One of the great ironies about people in the helping professions is that they are often among the ones who need the most help. I know a psychiatrist who has borderline personality disorder. A lot of therapists and social workers I know are depressed. The suicide rate among doctors in the U.S. is two or three times as high as the general population. There's a powerful stigma that prevents us from talking openly about how people whose job is to help others may themselves need help addressing their own mental health issues.

The world of yogis and meditators and spiritual teachers is no exception. But you wouldn't know that from looking at the marketing hype.

If you're that sort of teacher, it's often assumed that you've wrestled with your demons, and vanquished them. You've worked out the kinks and foibles in your human nature, so you stand a cut above the rest of us. Your inner light shines through at all times, unclouded by ordinary human neuroses. Traumas? Shadow material? You're beyond all that. This must be why you look so beatific and well composed in your Instagram photos.

My personal advice? Run as fast as you can in the other direction from any teacher who presents a highly manicured image of having it all together. Run from any teacher who looks down at the world from a superior perch and appears to have it all figured out, or who claims to have packed away all their emotional baggage.

In the past few years I've seen a lot of teachers who projected that sort of image fall from grace — exposing suddenly and almost violently their humanity, their struggles, and the demons with which were secretly wrestling. I've learned not to project too much of a sacred aura onto any of the cows roaming about in the contemporary spiritual pasture. If you spend much time around cows, sacred or not, you'll find most of them are full of something. I know I am.

My struggles with anxiety, among other things, are part of what initially drew me to the path of meditation, and they're still part of what keeps me practicing — and, perhaps just as importantly, part of what keeps me teaching. I may not always reveal to a room full of students what's roiling beneath the surface of my own psychological waters, because it's generally bad decorum to appear like a basket case when you're sitting in the teacher's seat. But within the inner sanctum of my own mind, where no one else goes, I'm never far-removed from a lifetime of roiling waters, or from the wellspring of shadow material that percolates just beneath the surface.

There's a famous quote from Richard Bach: "You teach best what you most need to learn."

The longer I teach, the more truth I find in that statement. When meditation students tell me how calming my voice and my presence are, or how much a certain practice or teaching I shared helped them reframe their perspective on a difficult situation, I know that sharing it with them probably helped me twice as much. I needed just as much as they did, if not more, to be reminded of the teaching by sharing it with them.

I think what I'm learning is that it's not in spite of my imperfections and human foibles, it's not in spite of my ongoing struggles with my own inner demons, but because of those things, that I have something genuine to offer as a teacher.

I'm coming clean here about my struggles with anxiety because I think coming clean is necessary. In the world of spiritual teachers and students, we need fewer sacred cows and more transparency and disclosure. Without an honest and open relationship to the more troublesome aspects of myself, I would be just another one of those slick Instagram gurus trying to sell you the path to happiness, as if I had it all figured out.

If you ever catch me doing that, feel free to slap me, and bring me back down to earth.

Assessing Childhood Developmental Trauma

The ACE Quiz ("ACE" stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences) has become a standardized way for psychologists and those treating trauma to assess some of the major factors that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. You can take the ACE quiz here.

The simple 10-question quiz gives you score on a scale of 0 to 10, with points being assigned for exposure to a number of commonly recognized sources of childhood trauma, from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse to physical or emotional neglect to various forms of household dysfunction such as parental divorce or having a parent or family member who is mentally ill, incarcerated, or addicted.

If you score high on the ACE quiz, it means you had numerous factors in your upbringing that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. In turn, childhood developmental trauma is known to contribute to other problems later in life, including increased risks for stress and depression, substance abuse, heart disease, and more.

However, it's important to understand what your score on the ACE quiz means and what it doesn't. If you have a high score, it just means that a lot of those commonly recognized adverse childhood experiences were present in your early life. It doesn't take into account other factors that might have helped you build resilience and overcome these adverse childhood conditions, such as the love and support you received from a certain family member or outside figure.

Some people with high ACE scores show few signs of developmental trauma, while others with low ACE scores go on to develop major depression, addiction, and so forth. So your score is not, strictly speaking, predictive of any particular outcome as an adult.

By contrast, the opposite may also be true. The ACE quiz looks at commonly recognized adverse conditions for developmental trauma, but some possibly traumatizing adverse conditions are glaringly absent.

When I took the ACE quiz, I was at first surprised at how high my number was. The quiz helped me to frame and understand some of the root causes of my own childhood developmental trauma. But over time, I came to realize there were other traumatic adversities in my childhood, too, that the quiz didn't even touch upon, such as sexual orientation and religious upbringing.

What about the fact that I was and am gay, and that I struggled throughout childhood and adolescence to suppress the growing evidence of my own sexual orientation in a homophobic culture that harshly forbade me from being who I was? There's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for internalized homophobia. There should be, because it's a widespread and very damaging form of developmental trauma.

What about the fearful hellfire-and-brimstone sermons I was subjected to as a child in the Southern Baptist Church in Oklahoma, the intense atmosphere of homophobia in that church, and the religious delusions and existential terror I suffered as a result of my indoctrination in that religious culture? In retrospect, I consider what I was subjected to by the church to be a form of child abuse. But again, there's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for religious manipulation and brainwashing. And there should be.

What about complex factors like race and socioeconomic status, which can feed into so many other adverse childhood experiences? There are generational traumas, and traumas that you may be born into because the color of your skin isn't the one that's privileged by the society you live in. No ACE checkboxes for those either.

For now, the ACE quiz is a stepping stone that can help you begin to get a handle on some of the Big 10, as it were. Knowing where you come from in relation to these 10 factors can be helpful in assessing the roots of your own childhood developmental trauma. But you also need to put your ACE quiz results in perspective, and look at the larger picture of things the quiz never touches upon.

The causes and effects of childhood developmental trauma are highly complex, and no standardized test can really give you a complete or accurate reading on the origins or effects of your own childhood trauma. We need better ways of assessing a wider variety of adverse childhood experiences, as well as traumatic social conditions that extend both inward, deep into our hearts and psyches, and outward, beyond the walls of the houses we grew up in.