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.

Truthfulness in Yoga and Buddhism

This is part one in a series of articles examining key principles of Yoga and Buddhism.

Today many people in the West approach Yoga primarily as a physical practice for training the body, and meditation as a tool for subduing the mind's noise and cultivating peace. These are fine goals in themselves, but they really only begin to scratch the surface.

Looking at Yoga and meditation in this way is sort of like looking at the small tip of an iceberg that sits above the surface of the water and believing you’ve seen the whole iceberg. There is so much more hidden down below — in fact, you may be missing about 95% of the iceberg.

In a gym Yoga class or in a contemporary mindfulness seminar, you’re not likely to hear the teacher speak much about morality and ethics. But that’s actually where both of these paths begin.

In Buddhism (which is the source of most contemporary meditation and mindfulness techniques), meditation is actually the second of three areas of training: Shila (Ethical Conduct), Samadhi (Meditation), and Prajña (Insight or Wisdom). Without the foundation of following certain ethical principles, it’s difficult or impossible to cultivate the higher states of meditation and insight that lead to spiritual freedom and awakening.

In the classical Yoga tradition, the same is true. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras lay out an eightfold path called ashtanga, more commonly known as the eight limbs of Yoga (ashta = eight and anga = limb). The first limb of Patanjali’s Yoga is Yama, the ethical standards that a Yogi should follow. The physical asana practice is the third limb, and its intention is not only to care for the body but to cultivate the discipline and focus necessary to approach the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th limbs of Yoga, all of which are concerned with meditation and insight.

To put it simply, without ethics your life is a mess — and you are haunted by the mess. You harm yourself and others with your thoughts, words and actions, and the consequences of this behavior torment your mind and body. The apple is rotten from the inside, and no amount of polishing its surface with asana practice or meditation is going to make it edible. The ethical precepts in Buddhism and Yoga restore the apple to a wholesome state, from the inside out.

The ethical principles from each tradition are largely the same. I’ll focus here on just one of them: Truthfulness.