In this episode, Jessica Morey speaks with Julie Paquette-Moore of the Engaged Mindfulness Institute about embodying authenticity in personal practice and giving and receiving feedback.
The importance of embodiment & authenticity in one's own practice and process.
The impact of relational mindfulness in teaching and engaging participants in learning.
Integrating adjacent skills and tools into a mindfulness curriculum.
Giving and receiving feedback.
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Jess Morey is a meditation teacher and contemplative coach. She began practicing meditation at age 14 on teen retreats offered by the Insight Meditation Society and has maintained a consistent commitment to meditation since. She is a lead teacher, cofounder, and former executive director of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, which runs in-depth mindfulness programming for youth and the parents and professionals who support them across the US and internationally. She is currently co-creating a Contemplative Semester program for young adults. Before dedicating her professional life to teaching mindfulness, Jess studied engineering and worked in clean energy finance. She has no doubt in the technical brilliance of humanity to solve the challenges facing us – including climate change and systemic injustice. She believes we need some help in our inner & interpersonal intelligence. https://jessicamorey.org/
Podcast Transcript
Julie Paquette-Moore 0:07
Welcome to another session of the Teaching Mindfulness Summit. I'm here today with Jess Morey. How are you doing, Jess? Good to see you.
Jessica Morey 0:15
Good to meet you.
Julie Paquette-Moore 0:17
I'd love to share your bio with our audience today so people can learn more about your background and history. I'm going to do that now before we jump in. Jess Morey is a meditation teacher and contemplative coach; she began practicing meditation at age 14 on teen retreats offered by the Insight Meditation Society and has maintained a consistent commitment to meditation since; she is the lead teacher and former executive director of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, which runs mindfulness programming for youth, and parents and professionals, which support them across the US and internationally. She is currently developing a contemplative semester program for young adults. Before dedicating her professional life to teaching mindfulness, she studied engineering and worked in clean energy finance. It's great to have you here. Thanks for being here.
Jessica Morey 1:18
Thank you. Thanks for organizing and being part of this.
Julie Paquette-Moore 1:22
Let's jump right in. Can you talk about becoming a mindfulness teacher, entering mindfulness teacher training, and a little about embodiment within that process?
Jessica Morey 1:56
I started taking meditation more seriously as a teenager. I went on teen retreats and fell in love with the practice, even at 14 and 15 years old. At that time, it was the community that I fell in love with, the sense of safety that I felt, and kindness in the community of the meditation teachers, the staff, and the youth. Then, I got more and more into the experience in my heart/mind of doing meditation and the experience of silence and peace inside. Initially, I took a year off, went to Myanmar, and practiced in a monastery. Before college, I took a gap year and practiced, and then I took a semester off in college and did a three-month meditation retreat. As a young adult, I was focused and dedicated to practice; I was finding a lot of benefits.
At that time, I aspired to teach and offer at some point. In some ways, because I was so in love with my teachers, they were amazing, and I wanted to be like them. But I also had this idea: ' Well, I'm gonna have a career, a family, and a life.' This was in my mind at a young age, and I wanted to teach meditation from a place of being like a busy professional with a family and be able to teach from life. I had it in my heart that I wanted to teach at some point, but it'd be pretty far out in my life. When I was in my late 20s, I volunteered for teen meditation retreats as a staff member with some of the people who were my teachers and mentors. One of the teachers didn't come to one retreat because she was sick at the last minute. So, my mentors asked me if I would step in and take on an assisting teaching role, which was terrifying. And then it just unfolded from there, you know, it just made sense for me to teach and, then I took over running that organization, we formed a nonprofit to run the team retreats, and so it just blossomed from there. Even then, living in DC, I worked in clean energy, policy, and finance.
I was reluctant to start running this organization because I was like, no, I have a career. I even have a master's degree in this. I have a direction I'm going. I thought I would do it for a year or two and help the organization start. And then, ten years later, I was still the executive director. So it's just unfolded like that. My deep love of practice and commitment and involvement have just brought me into more and more of a teaching role. And then I've been committed to training; I still ran a few more very long retreats during that time; I always, every year, go on retreat. I completed four years of teacher training with the Insight Meditation Society a few years ago. So there's also been just explicit training during that time.
Julie Paquette-Moore 5:29
It's interesting to hear about your path because it wasn't necessarily like, 'I enrolled in a teacher training and then started.' It sounds like a lot of practice and inspiration from your community and teachers. And also being thrown into your first teaching experience. I'm curious to hear your process because it doesn't sound linear. There were many different avenues. I'm curious now: what is the most helpful path for someone interested in becoming a mindfulness teacher? What steps are most essential to find their authentic place in this process? You said your teachers were a big part of what influenced you. What made you want to go into this path? Please discuss the path for others looking to get into this teacher training work. And what's most helpful or valuable in that experience? What's been most helpful and valuable for you?
Jessica Morey 6:52
Personal practice is the number one thing, and:
• Our deep commitment and practice
• Inspiration and dedication to meditation
• Having our own experiences of freedom, peace, and insight
• Teaching from a profound place of embodiment and integration
I started when I was in my late 20s. It was before the whole wave of mindfulness happened. When I was a teenager in the 90s, there was no such thing as a career in mindfulness. If you were going to teach meditation, it would be because you were so committed. You would be giving up a lot, you wouldn't be making any money, and you would probably be going to scrape by; it was almost like a monastic space. So it's just funny. Sometimes I feel like the whole saying when parents and grandparents say, 'I'd walk to school in the snow, both ways uphill!'
I sometimes think of how it was with mindfulness because there wasn't the internet when I started meditating. There weren't apps. You could get tapes, like physical tapes, mailed to you with recordings, but I didn't have that. And you meditate. Meditation was watching your breath or doing some loving kindness, period. That's all you did. So it's a very different world. And what's nice about that is that there's a purity to it. I love to practice. And so it unfolded in a certain way. And I would love for people to have as much as possible. And at the same time, it is beautiful, too. If you feel the inspiration from your benefit, to want to offer people, start a little neighborhood group or offer something to friends or family, something like that.
Even in high school, I started the meditation club with some people we would meet in the morning. And then, when I lived in DC, I had a group of friends; we just sat in our house at 7:30, and people would come over to the house, and we'd meditate for half an hour. Sometimes, we guide so just that it was still a volunteer offering. So, I have a strong commitment to that. And that's what my mentors have taught me. One of my mentors still says you don't have to rush teaching. He's been saying this, and I have taught for almost two decades. And I'm like Marv, I think that ship has sailed teaching, but that's always been the kind of guidance that I've been offered. You don't have to rush it. Just keep practicing and see what unfolds.
Julie Paquette-Moore 10:00
That's beautiful. So, it's like starting small. It doesn't have to be so formal or going in as a job with a corporation or wherever the case may be. It can be just getting comfortable yourself in practice, like you mentioned, and then offering to groups of friends or family. And even like what you said, your teacher is saying, You don't have to be a teacher almost embodying that spirit of I am just sharing practice, rather than that title of teacher or facilitator in a sense.
Jessica Morey 10:39
Exactly. The other valuable thing is wanting to keep your practice going- staying with your practice. Ideally, you'd have a teacher or mentor you're meeting with regularly who can support your practice and teaching. So you've got some guardrails, with support. And then, if there's any way to have a community of other colleagues and teach people who are teaching, there's some way that it keeps us humble, honest, and supported to ensure that we have those structures around us, too, when we start teaching.
Julie Paquette-Moore 11:15
That's a good place to pivot a little bit. You first talked about finding your community before even finding the practice. And now you're talking about being in that space and having those people close to that community. In your work in training others or in your work in developing and becoming a teacher yourself, how important are the community and relational practices versus the image that people get of just someone sitting on their own in meditation practice? How important is it in teacher training? How do you bring in these relational practices and aspects to others to share in that way?
Jessica Morey 12:17
It's huge; it's been central to my path and all of my teaching. The teaching of young people, and then the teaching in teacher training, the training I do for folks. What that brought to mind was when my meditation teachers started a mentoring program when I was in my early 20s. And they invited about 20 of us, 20 of us in our early 20s, somewhere in our 20s. And what we would do is we'd get together for ten days every year, we would do a meditation retreat, we would do seven days of silent practice, and then we would hang out for three days at the end. And then even in that, and maybe that was the first time I taught, they asked us to give Dharma talks or the talks in the evening. We did that for ten years; they originally started it for three years. So we went every summer and then kept going for ten years.
Some of those people are my closest friends. Today, they are still my closest colleagues at work. Kalila Archer was in that program, and she's been my co-conspirator at Inward Bound. She was one of the central people creating Inward Bound, particularly the wilderness programs. But then she was also the program director. And now, she's central to this contemplative semester we're creating for college students. It's amazing to have that community that is still supporting. One of the other folks is Oren Sofer, who's become more of a well-known meditation teacher. He was in that, so we teach together at IMS (Insight Meditation). Part of our teachers' intention was to support us in being friends and having a community.
More important than supporting us in becoming teachers, they wanted that friendship and connection to be the foundation so we didn't have to become teachers. But if some of us did that, it would grow out of connection and community. So this happened. Another friend from that group became a monk for several years. Then, he was a professor at Brown in Buddhist studies and is still a close friend. Many of those people are my very close friends. So I feel deeply grateful for that. And then when we teach at our teacher training and teen retreats, there's always relational practice and small group work, which is so much about being able to be authentic and honest about ourselves and normalize the challenges that we have heard other people's challenges, develop empathy for ourselves for others with compassion, practice communication, and authentic, vulnerable communication.
Then the other big piece is about giving and receiving feedback, which is very important. We hear about so many unfortunate challenges with teachers, especially spiritual teachers, and we could call them gaps in their ethics or behavior and the impacts of their behaviors. In many ways, the only way to address that is to have a group of friends and peers that we trust that we're getting feedback from, and feedback as love, love, and support. So, that's been a huge part of my practice and the people I work with. And when we work on teen retreats, there is ongoing feedback. We train our trainees and give and receive feedback as well.
Julie Paquette-Moore 16:09
That's such a great subject; you can be going around teaching, and maybe there are some shadow things or something that you're not seeing about your teaching that appears or a friend might pick up on. Having that open communication and being able to give feedback can change how you're presenting, not only in a teaching situation but also with friends and family, how you present yourself in the world. I'm curious because feedback can be difficult to give and receive in a way that is, as you mentioned, through love through care. Is there something specific a certain way or something about how you're training that you learned to give and receive feedback that you see as different? Or is there a technique, methodology, or something that may change the typical feedback route?
Jessica Morey 17:12
Thanks for saying that. And even as I talk about it, I can feel my nervous system getting a little anxious, you know, that even the word feedback about getting feedback, it's like, 'Ah.' I think two things that I want to say about that my communication and feedback skills are primarily inspired by nonviolent communication training and a mentor of mine, a woman named Mickey Kashdan, who's not a meditator but who is a profoundly self-aware, compassionate, brilliant human coming from the nonviolent communication world. She mentored me in giving and receiving feedback in a clear way from love, and she has a whole approach. Using nonviolent communication is something I highly recommend practicing and learning.
Oren Sofer's book 'Say What You Mean' combines mindfulness and nonviolent communication. There is an approach to that. That's one piece, I'll say this concrete. And the other thing that she always teaches is that feedback is a gift. It's a gift to the other person. That's what we can track for. This is where our meditation practice is so helpful because we can follow my motivation right now. Why do I want to say what I want to say? Is it because I'm triggered, and I want to tell you what you did wrong? Or is it that I love you, and I want to offer you a gift because I can imagine the way that you're showing up or the way you did this thing could have this impact on a lot of people. It will reduce the positive impact you can have and the benefit you can have in the world. So that's just one little thing we can look at when we think about feedback. Why do I want to offer this? Where's it coming from in me? We can work with that and get help for our triggers or an activation from someone else. We can get some empathy, find out what the gift is in it, and then offer it to the person.
Julie Paquette-Moore 19:34
That's beautiful. In so many ways, it relates directly back to practice or mindfulness practice because, in some ways, I think you have to have the skill to pause and reflect before just giving your opinion or giving it in a way that doesn't come from love and care. That's almost like having that moment to recognize compassionate speech or something else. That's beautiful. I wonder if any other skills are helpful in mindfulness teaching and training. Are there adjacent skills that aren't specifically related to meditation practice but skills like nonviolent communication, as you mentioned, or giving and receiving feedback that you see as helpful to the development of mindfulness teachers or people in training?
Jessica Morey 20:31
Thank you. This ties into the last question, too; the other piece I might want to say about feedback is receiving feedback. What's so valuable, important, and vital is loving ourselves. We must unconditionally love, accept ourselves, and hold our basic goodness or Buddha nature. When I'm in that place, I'm okay; I am good. I'm lovable, and I can hear the mistakes I made. I don't go into that like shame black hole that sucks you in. Then, the feedback feeds into this internal collapse.
What's vital is that when I know my love, feel lovable, loved, and feel good, I can hear feedback and decide what I want to do about that. Do I want to shift? Do I want to accept my limitations and say that's not something that I can change? It gives me choice and space. Using our meditation practice and any other tool is like therapy.
I've done a lot of internal family systems therapy, which I love and is a good match for contemplative practice. I've also done a lot of study and healing around attachment theory. Those practices, plus my loving-kindness practice, have helped me shift out of patterns of shame, self-hatred, self-blame, and self-criticism and develop more and more of a sense of unconditional loving presence for myself. So that is central to feedback and our teaching, and when we have that, it's like we're less vulnerable to teaching because I'm trying to get my ego needs. And I don't necessarily like the term ego needs, but I'm not trying to be loved. I'm not going to teach so that you love me and look up to me because I already feel love. I don't need you to love me; I don't need you to look up to me; I feel my goodness. Doing our work around that and healing our psychological work feels vital.
Julie Paquette-Moore 23:28
So before even training to share the practice with others, we need to be clearer in terms of seeing our goodness and being in a place to receive with love, not just giving but receiving in that way. So again, it brings us back to how you started doing our work, having our practice or other practices that help and are relatable, not necessarily just meditation practice, but other practices. I had a question that came up; I'd like to know if there's something that you could share in terms of the intention for wanting to share practice, maybe something behind that, or getting clear behind intentions.
Jessica Morey 24:45
The simplest way to frame that, and I got this clarity with Mickey Kashdan, my mentor, is that within nonviolent communication, there's the idea that we all have these universal human needs, which are all important. So, one of those needs is to be seen, known, and loved. Those needs are super important. Everyone has them. And we should, we deserve to be loved, seen, known, valued to matter. It is super important; many of us have deficits in those areas. We should meet those needs, but not necessarily through being a teacher.
Sometimes, we try to get those needs to matter and to be seen as loved by teaching. And there are other ways to get those needs met. So, we are getting needs met by teaching everything we do in this concept to meet a need. The needs we want to orient towards are more around a desire and a need to contribute. I want to contribute; I want you to be happy, and I want you to have the kind of same insights and inner freedom that I've experienced through my meditation practice. That's why I want to teach; this has been super beneficial to me, and I hope it could be for you. So that's the kind of thing, too, that if we're tracking inside ourselves, what is my motivation? What needs Am I trying to meet by teaching? And as much as possible, orienting towards the needs more around contribution and offering, but not denigrating your need to matter, or your need to have financial security, those matter. But you should figure out a different way to get those needs met.
Julie Paquette-Moore 26:38
That's great. So, asking or revisiting that intention, Why am I doing this? To make sure that it's for reasons that would be most helpful for all beings rather than just for self.
Jessica Morey 27:07
And what I think is so important and what I love about nonviolent communication is that there's no judgment of those needs. That need to be met or that need to be loved, seen, and known are huge. I want everyone to have those needs met and every child to have those needs met. I want to offer that to the people I work with. They are beautiful needs. I want to meet those needs for me, but not in my teaching role because that's where things can get complicated.
Julie Paquette-Moore 27:41
That makes complete sense, normalizing and valuing this 'being human' and all the emotions and needs that come along with it. And then being able to work with that. I don't know if we necessarily separate it, but work with that as the way we present when sharing mindfulness practice with others. That's great. I'm wondering if you can share what you think might be one of the more important skills for someone who wants to share practice. Is there anything you share with students in your training, like 'this is a must in teacher training'? This skill we want to see people develop. What would that be?
Jessica Morey 28:45
Two are coming to mind, and one I've already talked about is that sense of embodying mindfulness. The skill of being embodied in mindfulness can be teaching and being mindful, feeling your body, knowing your emotions, tracking your thoughts, tracking your reactivity as much as possible, and more and more over time. That ability to be deeply mindful as your teaching feels huge. That means you can do that when talking to people and conversing. There is just more and more embodiment of mindfulness and self-awareness.
The other that comes to mind is clarity, as much clarity as you can around what you are teaching and why you are teaching it. What's the intention? What is the skill you're hoping that the person develops? So, just having a connection to the what and why feels important. I always return to the embodiment and transmission as the most important piece. You can be super clear and give a great curriculum. But it doesn't matter as much if you're not embodying it. And that's also what I love about working with young people because they are tracking that.
Julie Paquette-Moore 30:13
I was going to ask about embodiment and authenticity. It's not just being on the cushion. It's about how we walk through life and interact with others. I work with youth myself, which is an important piece with youth. They know if you need to be more authentic. I think it's very obvious. This is even more so when working with the youth. Authenticity, embodiment. Do you have any advice for people interested in this training and teaching path? Any advice to those wanting to take that step?
Jessica Morey 31:04
I'll ask if you could find a teacher or mentor you can be in ongoing communication with about your practice. If you can go on retreat, go on Silent Retreat. And keep practicing. Find a mentor, keep practicing, and go on retreat. That would be my advice.
Julie Paquette-Moore 31:36
Thank you. This has been great. How can people learn more? I know you have some new endeavors in the works. How can people learn more about your current projects?
Jessica Morey 31:54
I have a website, jessicamorey.org. I have a newsletter, and you could sign up for it. I need to catch up with that newsletter. But occasionally, I'll send whatever's happening, retreats I'm teaching, courses, etc. It's the overarching place to learn about things. Then, I have some recordings and meditations. The other big thing that's getting going is that we're creating this contemplative semester for college-age students. It's for 18 to 25-year-olds, which could be a gap year, college semester, or post-college. And we'll likely be giving college credit through Hampshire College in Massachusetts. It could be like a semester of college for students. That's next fall, 2024. For 14 weeks, in person, in Southern Vermont. There is a lot of practice and integration. So much of what I've been discussing is nature and community building. That's happening at contemplativesemester.org; you can Google that or go to the website contemplativesemester.org. I would love it if you are 18 and 25 listening to this to go check it out. And if you work with people that age or you know someone that this might benefit to pass it on, spread the word. We've done a lot of fundraising for it, so many scholarships are available for those who need them.
Julie Paquette-Moore 33:35
That's great. I work with youth who are a little bit younger, elementary and high school age, and there's that need in that area. People are looking to go a little deeper than just a class. That's relevant and necessary. Then, the fact that you can make it more accessible and have the funding for it is vital. That's great to hear. I can't wait to hear more about it.
Jessica Morey 34:05
I can't wait to see how it goes. I'm pretty excited about it; it will be amazing. It'll be a deep dive; there will be four weeks of Silent Retreat over the semester. And every Wednesday is a silent practice day, and practice each day. There will be a lot of practice, deep exploration, and study.
Julie Paquette-Moore 34:31
I imagine the community of youth that was such a thread throughout your training. Building a community will be so lucky for the youth.
Jessica Morey 34:41
The group that's going to be there as staff is awesome. Many long-term friendships and relationships support it.
Julie Paquette-Moore 34:52
Wonderful. It's been great speaking to you about your journey and what you feel is vital to people who want to share these practices in their development. So, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate speaking with you.
Jessica Morey 35:11
Thank you for your questions.
Julie Paquette-Moore 35:13
Thank you, be well.
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