In this episode, Martin Alyward speaks with Fleet Maul, Ph. D., of the Prison Mindfulness Institute, about the impact of Buddhist meditation on mindfulness instruction, ethical standards for mindfulness educators, and the importance of extensive training in mindfulness teaching.
Buddhist meditation practices and their influence on teaching mindfulness.
Integrating spiritual experiences into daily life.
Ethical guidelines for mindfulness teachers.
Long apprenticeships in mindfulness teaching.
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Martin Aylward began dharma practice and study at age 19, spending several years in Asian monasteries and with Himalayan hermits. Teaching worldwide since 1999, Martin co-founded Moulin de Chaves, the retreat center where he lives and teaches in SW France; the Mindfulness Training Institute; and the online dharma community Sangha Live. A husband and father, he integrates dharma into daily life with programs like Work Sex Money Dharma. His latest book is Awake Where You Are (2021). https://martinaylward.com/
Podcast Transcript
Fleet Maull 0:05
Hi, welcome to another session of the Teaching Mindfulness Summit. My name is Fleet Maull, and I am your cohost for this session. I'm happy to be here today with my friend and colleague, Martin Aylward. Welcome.
Martin Aylward 0:17
Nice to see you.
Fleet Maull 0:18
It's great to be here with you. So I will share your background with the audience, and then we'll jump right in, Okay?
Martin Aylward 0:25
Sure. Okay.
Fleet Maull 0:27
So, at age 19, Martin left for India with a one-way ticket and no luggage. He spent most of the next four years in Asian monasteries, retreat centers, and ashrams where he developed a formal meditation practice based on the Vipassana Insight meditation, also exploring many different teachings and practice forms. He spent several months with Ajahn Buddhadasa at Wat Suan Mokkh in Thailand. He sat at annual month-long retreats throughout the 1990s at the Thai monastery in Bodh Gaya with Christopher Titmuss. After 10 years of practice, Christopher encouraged him to begin teaching. Martin has also studied and practiced with various Buddhist teachers and traditions, including the Vajrayana practices of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. Martin spent two years living with Sukhanta Giri Babaji, a Hindu Sadhu, at his hermitage near Dharamsala and has lived and practiced with various other Indian Sadhus and Himalayan hermits. He also studied the Diamond Approach of A.H. Almaas for 13 years. Since 1995, Martin has lived with his family in southwest France, where he and his wife, Gail, co-founded Moulin de Chaves in 2005, a residential retreat center where he lives and teaches and where their now adult children grew up. They also co-founded the Dharma Yatra, pilgrimages through France, with more than 200 people walking silently for several weeks, sharing teachings and practices, and camping together. He has led wilderness retreats in France and the USA and, with Gail, occasionally takes small groups of Dharma students to practice in India and Bhutan at various places associated with the Buddha's life.
So, quite a background there. We've known each other for a while and have been part of some groups. I wasn't that familiar with your background till I read that bio, especially your early time in India was quite adventurous. As a young person, I took off to South America as a backpacker and had that whole experience there. But you jumped in; I saw one photo of you; I guess you were practicing with one of the Sadhus or something; you had the trident next to you there, and you were bare-chested, and you had the whole thing going on. It looked like you were in your late teens, early 20s, or something.
Martin Aylward 3:03
Yes. And just that sort of teenage restlessness, wandering, existential questions about life, not knowing where to look, and being rather perplexed and amazed about being human and conscious. And somehow, that sense that India would have all the answers to those existential questions. And so I just ran away there. And somehow, that turned out to be right. In my case, it did have those questions, or it had a way of pointing me in the direction of learning the practices to meet life. The first time I connected with meditation teachings and practices, I thought, Oh, there's a way to explore my consciousness and train my attention. That was so revelatory because I had all these deep questions, but I felt like I was going round and round with them. So, finding this whole body of teachings and practices to guide me through the territory of my mind, heart, and life was deeply inspiring.
Fleet Maull 4:15
You were exposed to several different teachings and traditions but ended up primarily in the Vipassana Insight meditation tradition. So, could you talk about how your pathway led you there, and then you trained with Christopher Titmuss for quite a while?
Martin Aylward 4:32
I soaked up what I found when I got to India, and there was something very immediate and direct about Insight meditation; you're practicing in line with the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha's main body of unpacking how meditation works. I also spent much time in the Himalayas, where the Tibetans lived in exile, where the Dalai Lama and many other teachers and monasteries were. But somehow, I found all the iconography and some of the Guru veneration Rinpoche stuff in the Tibetan tradition a little off-putting, at least then.
And so there was something straightforward about Vipassana practice. And it was like, Oh, it's all about me, my mind and reality, and just lining those things up and exploring them. And I don't need to take on board a particular relationship to a tradition, or I don't need to adopt any particular belief systems. And that was a good fit for my iconoclastic adolescent self, somehow.
Out of that, relationships with teachers, traditions, and practices developed, and a sense of devotion came naturally. But that felt very different to me. I felt very devoted to my teachers, grateful, appreciative, and respectful. But that felt different to me than some practices that made it more of a prerequisite; you've got to bow in this way. And this teacher is... when presented in that way, I felt a little allergic to it. So yeah, Vipassana felt clean, direct, accessible, and then it worked, right, and very immediately powerful.
Fleet Maull 6:39
And really, the mainstream mindfulness movement has been largely influenced by the Vipassana Insight tradition and some other sources, and there's a lot of overlap. Many practice and teach fairly secularly but may also be involved in retreats with Buddhist teachers in the insight meditation tradition. So there is a lot of overlap there. That seems to be the case, especially the way it's been presented in the West; Insight Meditation is coming out of the Theravada Tradition and seems to be the one that's presented in almost the most secular way, even when it is still ostensibly in a Buddhist context. So, it has lent itself to being mainstreamed.
Martin Aylward 7:24
I think, even though if you go to a Theravada monastery in a Theravada country, a lot of what you'll find won't be Vipassana meditation, you'll find a lot of altar worship and a lot of rituals going along with the monastics, etc. And so there are plenty of cultural expressions around chanting, ritual, etc. But when you get into the meditative practices, which are not a feature of all Theravada Buddhism by any means, but the places and the lineages that uphold those practices, there is that way of holding them in this very direct way. And they often look to the sutras and the text for meditation instruction.
And so, in that sense, I think it lends itself to a more secular expression because you do not have to filter out other parts of the tradition. You do not have to concern yourself with ideas of rebirth, with what the power of mantra is, etc. You do not have to get into anything speculative it's very much experience, pay attention to your breath, your body, your mind states, and your thought activity, and come into a relationship with that. And how can that relationship be both contactful and spacious? Then you start to meet the spaciousness of awareness, which changes your relationship to body and thought, so the transformational stuff of your practice happens without needing to employ all that other stuff.
That was very attractive to me, and then, as it went on, I also fell in love with chanting, lighting incense, and some of those ritual aspects. But I feel like the impetus and connection to those things came more out of a love of a way to express the heart love of this practice and love of its possibilities, which, for me, felt very different than taking it on as something that belonged to an exotic or foreign type.
Fleet Maull 9:44
There has been a significant overlap between the Insight meditation tradition and the mainstream or secular mindfulness movement here in the US, and some of the teachers here in the US were very influential, including Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and others.
And in Europe, I think Christopher Titmuss has that same kind of stature. People in the US may be less familiar with Christopher, but he's originally from the UK. And one of the predominant teachers in Europe of that tradition. And so I wonder, both studying with Christopher for years, studying in Thai monasteries, and having been exposed to Tibetan teachers and Hindu Sadhus and other teachers, how has all this influenced your current style of teaching mindfulness and how you present the teaching?
Martin Aylward 10:40
It has all influenced, yet it's hard to say how because the show hasn't been organized. You know what I mean, I haven't decided, Oh, I'll take this from there, and this from there. It's more just, oh, when I came across teachings, teachers, and ways of practicing that seemed helpful, then I invested in that and followed it. And if I got to somewhere that didn't seem helpful, I left it aside. And if it continued to be helpful, I tried to squeeze out the honey, like the Buddha would say.
And so inevitably, there's the influence of those things. So I feel like my primary education, dharma education, and mindfulness education were within the Insight meditation tradition, Christopher and Ajahn Buddhadasa being the main influences. But then there's something in the Vajrayana doctrine and Mahamudra practices that emphasizes very immediate direct, the primordial, immediate, transcendental, and yet imminent nature of consciousness, like right here, right now; consciousness is already awake, everything's already free. You don't have to go anywhere, get to anything, purify anything. The availability of that already awake, already free, here and now, the language of that is very potent in the Vajrayana traditions.
And, I would say, even though my teachers were more orientated to the early Buddhist Theravada tradition, Ajahn Buddhadasa was often likened to teaching more like a Zen master than a Theravadan monk. Christopher certainly had an evident emphasis on the here and now, being awake, and fulfilling the human potential for an awakened life here and now. They were not models of lifetimes of practice. So even though I had that influence very strongly from Ajahn Buddhadasa and Christopher, and that was partly what I responded to very much.
The language, descriptions, and models for that immediacy are generally more developed in the Vajrayana than in the Theravadan. So, inevitably, I borrow from those things. Then, the training in the Diamond approach gave me a grounding in Western depth psychology that I didn't have from Dharma practice. So I remember thinking, after about 15 years of practice, that so much of my life and understanding seemed to have transformed. Yet, I could go and visit my parents for three days and still find myself very easily triggered into the reactivity I was having at 15. I was like, maybe there's room for something else here.
So, just going back and doing some basic psychological inner work on object relations, early attachments, and things like that was very helpful. The model of relational inquiry is finely developed using the diamond approach. That's also been an influence, unlike in our mindfulness teacher training, which maybe we'll get on to talk about in a little while. We often use relational exploration in meditation retreats, but some of the retreats I teach are completely silent.
But often, I'll get people to explore out loud with each other. And there's something about just tuning into your experience and speaking it that helps it become clearer because it's like you sort of understand something. Still, you don't know quite that you understand it until you hear it coming out of your mouth, and that can help crystallize one's understanding, recognition, or connection with what's happening. And then also doing that in relationship, hearing somebody else voice something true and powerful for them and then witnessing that and feeling the effects in yourself and responding to that. So, the diamond approach was quite influential in that form.
Fleet Maull 15:01
I had the opportunity to interview A. H. Almaas a couple of times on his work, and it's fascinating. So this summit is all about teaching mindfulness, and I know you, with your colleague, Mark Coleman, have been leading a mindfulness teacher training program for quite some time, and you train teachers and other settings. So I want to explore that. But first, perhaps, I'd like to explore some of the more profound possibilities within these practices, such as the mindfulness practice of mindfulness and awareness practice and the insight meditation practice.
In the West, what we sometimes think of as the mainstream or secular mindfulness movement is focused on stress relief, well-being, enhancing well-being, psychological well-being, or psychological improvements. It can be a performance enhancement brought into the corporate sector, which is all good. I think it's all very good, helping people have a better quality of life and live healthier lives. Also, I think it's normalizing meditation and mindfulness in a larger culture, creating a ground for those wishing to go deeper.
At the same time, I know you're quite interested in them and the profound possibilities within these practices for radical transformation of consciousness. I know you lead many deep retreats and work with students on a deep path. So, I wonder if you could discuss those more profound possibilities within the practice before discussing mindfulness teaching.
Martin Aylward 16:44
First, I have no argument with your explanation of secular mindfulness and its benefits and beauty. In many ways, it's just an appropriate cultural doorway. In Asian traditions, the appropriate cultural doorway is the temple. People will go, light incense, and honor their ancestors, and that's beautiful. Some want to go beyond that doorway into the deeper forms of transformational practice.
Installing temples wouldn't be the right cultural doorway for most people in Europe or the US. And so what we call secular mindfulness is a brilliant cultural doorway. It's appropriate; it operates largely within a psychological framework, like well-being, stress relief, improved relationships, etc. And if one can get all those benefits from it, great. And yet, if you're operating just in a psychological framework, you tend to interpret all your experiences psychologically, right?
In other words, me-my life, my issues, problems, meditation, benefits, insights, and improvement. And so, while it's wonderful to improve one's life, that can be constrained by the boundaries of self, of me. One of the ways of characterizing that is it's like you're decorating the walls of a prison cell, making it pretty, making it lighter, making it smell nice, opening the windows, maybe you get a bigger cell. And yet, what about a larger vision that goes entirely beyond those walls? And so, in the traditions from which the mindfulness scene has grown, that's the model. Primarily, it's not about me developing a nicer or better life. My benefits are a happy side effect. So me feeling more relaxed is good.
But the central brilliant thread running through these practices is that the center of my life needn't be about I, me, and my. And all the while, my psychological needs, my psychological preferences, my psychological reality, all the while, that's the center of my life. There's an inherent tension because I'm always trying to manage myself and myself. I'm always tweaking; what do I want? What do I like? Is it good enough? My wishes and my preferences are exhausting. We don't notice that it's exhausting because we're so used to doing it.
But naturally, the space of meditation and the invitation of meditation is to drop the I, me, and my, or we could say, to see through the prison walls and the endless reinforcing of me and my. And to point to the possibility that we might find that consciousness doesn't belong to me, needn't be held on by me. It's also possible to have a relationship with the mind, body, world, and reality not defined by control and ownership. Then, life starts to open up, so it doesn't feel like my life; I don't need to assert a sense of myself in it all. And then I find it all doesn't belong to me. I'm not the one doing it. And the feeling is putting down the burden of self. A taste of belonging to everything, if you like, rather than belonging to oneself. The feeling might be of not doing anything, not reinforcing a sense of self, not being the actor of the agent, the controller, the manipulator of one's life. That might sound rather passive as if I'm not doing anything. But no one's life goes on being dynamic, creative, engaged, and responsive to what's happening. But that's what the traditions point to when they talk about liberation, the liberation from the tyranny of asserting and reinforcing and defending a sense of self, or many different senses of self.
Fleet Maull 21:54
I want to talk about what that looks like, feels like, how it shows up in our lives, and some quality of liberation. Interestingly, in your journey, you integrated your deep meditative work with the Diamond approach, where there is the use of depth psychology and working through some of our psychological stuff and emotional stuff because people can have quite profound experiences of nonself, of emptiness, or transcendent experiences, and yet, seemingly haven't become all that much kinder sometimes, or all that much more emotionally intelligent even sometimes.
Their realization may be incomplete. If one stabilizes beyond the self somehow, one would naturally be more relational and less selfish, less egotistical and more relational. But it does seem that it's possible to have powerful experiences, to have practiced a lot, and to maybe not be so caught, but still have the potential of having some shadow stuff going on or haven't developed the depths of compassion. One thing I appreciated about the Tibetan tradition is the tremendous emphasis on compassion through the path, like just coming back. And in some ways, that's all the Tibetan teachers talk about compassion. So, I wonder if you could talk about how that plays out.
For most Westerners, deeper psychological and emotional work wasn't so much part of the Asian traditions, and maybe it wasn't as necessary then. Maybe some of those cultures weren't as traumatized as ours are, although it's hard to say. I think there has always been human trauma going on. But anyway, I'm just wondering how you feel if we're talking about the possibilities of genuine liberation, and then how would that show up in one's life in terms of how one's experiencing life and how one's showing up in life and how others are experiencing us.
Martin Aylward 24:05
So you know, one can have liberating experiences or experiences that at least feel liberating once a sense of reality has transformed, one's experience of self dissolves, one feels like, Oh, the universe is made up of infinite space, or consciousness is seamlessly, everywhere, inner and outer, or the fabric of reality is love, et cetera, et cetera. We're familiar with this, beautiful. And then you might be brought around up through meditation, those kinds of experiences, or through psychedelics, or through just contact with nature, or spontaneously or in a moment of danger, like a car crash, there are all kinds of triggers for those things.
So what's significant is not having a cosmic experience; if you like, it's the integration of it. Otherwise, it becomes an amazing memory or even something we're in conflict with because we fill the gap. I had that amazing experience, but now I am back to ordinary life, and I struggle with that. So, the traditions offer various models for integration. There's an ethical way of behaving towards each other, emphasizing compassion, non-harming, respect, kindness, etc.
And then there are all these integrative practices just on how we attend to our behavior; we watch where our intentions go. And some of those are protective measures against getting carried away with the idea of Oh, there's no one here, nothing to do, everything's naturally free. And then that can become a license for, you know, nothing matters, etc. And with people who have been around the spiritual scene, there are plenty of examples of people getting carried away with realization experiences, and they're not using them to justify bad behavior and manipulative behavior, etc.
So, the integrative aspect of practice is present in Asian traditions; I think some translate well, but some don't. And we live in a more psychological, more individualistic culture. So, I don't want to get too much into clumsy east-west comparisons or ancient modern comparisons. But I think it's probably true that we, Americans, Europeans, and increasingly, the whole world, are certainly living in the most individualistic times. Cultures used to be more communal, collective, etc. And so that affects our psychology. The emphasis on me and myself is kind of at pathological logical levels.
And so the more we're culturally even, the more we're pushed into a box of individualism. We need two things: to find ways to connect to a larger sense of collective, where our needs and my responsibilities to the collective are just as important as my needs from the collective. We emphasize rights and human rights a lot, and all that's important, but what about not just our rights to get, but our responsibilities to give, etc.?
Along with that, I think we've recognized that one of the gifts of Western understanding of humanity to the world is this psychological sophistication that we've come up with. Given that we're living in such psychologically intense and individualistic times and cultures, we need some tools to unpack and make sense of that. Otherwise, we just maintain this very narrow vision of what I was calling I, me, and my.
Fleet Maull 28:15
So, in the Asian Dharma traditions, precept practices have been very important at the monastic level and lay precepts for laypeople. And those served as guardrails in many ways, but they're more than that. They're a deep practice. And I think a lot of, I know myself when I was young, I think a lot of the young people in the West tended to associate that, or it sounded like another restrictive, prescriptive, dogmatic thing similar to the 10 commandments or something that maybe we're already throwing out the rulebook and looking to live free and wild.
We often gave short shrift to the precept practice. But I loved how Pema Chodron, a well-known Western monastic, described precept practice at one point; it simplifies one's life and makes more of a blank canvas in which one's primary obstacles stand out in stark relief, and it easier to work with them.
So I've always tried to encourage people to understand precept practice, not so much as shoulds or a thing you have to do- any punishment-related thing. But it's simply a way to see one's life more clearly. And gives you a frame through which to look, all the way. In our modern society, we've taken that the basic precept is not to harm. That's the fundamental precept.
But then that can go down to many levels as one's understanding deepens. We all participate in harm, and hopefully, we try to develop the intention to harm as little as possible, but you can't be alive and not harm. Take, for example, the current phenomena of climate change. We're all involved in that.
So anyway, the precept practice is a very important part that came out of the Dharma traditions that can be used creatively. I love the way Thich Nhat Hanh took what is often presented as negate, like, Don't do this, don't do that, or refrain from this refrain from that. And he crafted a more positive-facing version of, Well, yes, but do this and do this and do that. Not only don't take what's not freely offered, but steward resources.
So, I'm curious about that aspect from your perspective. It seems like teaching might bridge us into training and teaching mindfulness teachers. Even in a mainstream secular world, it seems important for mindfulness teachers to develop a strong ethical foundation for what they're doing.
Martin Aylward 31:01
In many ways, precept practice is also a way to be happy. It's a way to be happy if you're being manipulative, greedy, deceitful, etc. That's not a happy life. To treat somebody else badly, you can't treat somebody else badly without going around with the thoughts that make you treat them badly. And the resentment and the greed, etc, etc. That's just an uncomfortable way to live. So even though we get pulled around by our compulsions, greedy compulsions, or we feel hurt by somebody, we want to lash out at them, etc. When we go along with those impulses, we live with a greedy or resentful mind, an aggressive mind, and a blaming mind.
So, the precepts are more than a moral code of how to be a good person; it's helpful to see them as a beautiful way to clarify the heart. Then, there's this phrase that the Buddha uses about Sila: virtue or conduct. And the phrase is The Bliss of Blamelessness. It's just touching those few words. So, if we see precept practice as a way of cultivating the Bliss of Blamelessness, it's not moral blamelessness, like, Oh, one never does anything wrong. But it's that feeling that I am going through my life being led by the wish to be kind, the wish to not cause trouble, the wish to be generous, and then we find we have plenty of opportunities for those things, not in a grand way, but just in the interaction you might have with a shopkeeper. You can have an automatic interaction where you barely notice the person. You can have a grumpy interaction. But you can also take the time to see the person smile, say thank you, and just appreciate that Oh, here's somebody providing a service, etc.
The reorientation of the heart from the selfish mode in which we're taught to behave, follow our dreams, do what we want, look after ourselves, and switch back to a sense of precept practices and opening of the heart. Meditation will only work if you're fundamentally orientated to that kind of kindness. You can't treat people badly, so you sit down and have everything open up peacefully and beautifully. Because all that's going to open up is those mind states, you're going just to be put in touch with the fact that you're operating in a way that's not just hurting others, but every bit as much hurting yourself.
Then you're going around with that greedy or blaming mind. So I think that's helpful for us to remember, a preset practice not as a bunch of moral injunctions, but as a way of contacting The Bliss of Blamelessness, of actually having the benefit in our own heart of having those beautiful mind states that don't want to harm, we want to be kind and generous, want to support others where we can.
Fleet Maull 34:39
I love that framing precepts is a source of happiness. And I think, at one point, the Buddha was asked to express the Dharma in the most brief version. It was something like, do not harm, do all that's good, and then purify the mind; the third one is quite important because by purifying the mind and clarifying the mind, we understand the causes of happiness. And what are the causes of suffering.
The practice of the precepts has memorialized people's insight over many years into what produces happiness and what produces suffering. So why not follow the pathways that they create? It then gets codified.
And even the 10 commandments are the same thing. All the different religious traditions have said, This is what works well. And this is what doesn't work well. And then it gets codified and becomes punitive sometimes, and then we resist it. But it all arises from that inspiration to understand what supports life and leads to happiness. And what is it that undermines life and leads to suffering?
Let's talk about teaching mindfulness and training teachers. You've been training mindfulness teachers for decades. I'm curious what you've learned about training mindfulness teachers and what you feel are some of the most important elements of someone's training if one's going to be called to offer the practice and share the practice with others. What are some of the qualities and skills that people need to develop?
Martin Aylward 36:18
People have different strengths, things they might need to develop, doubts, etc. The one central piece for anyone is recognizing and then trusting in the goodness of one's practice. If somebody has signed up to take a teacher training, if somebody feels that they wish to teach mindfulness, it may have self-interest in it. They may have some element where they want to see themselves as lovely, mindful, beautiful, etc. But the core is that the only reason anyone gets interested is because they've started to practice themselves and seen and felt the benefits of themselves. They want to share those benefits with others. That's beautiful.
And yet, that core motivation, which I recognize 100% is everybody's core motivation, often gets lost, forgotten, or covered over. It even becomes lost to the person themselves because they think about that professional development and then get caught in doubt. They see their teachers, and they think, Oh, this person is so skillful, and me, I've only been practicing for three years, and still I get distracted myself, et cetera. And so they undermine that confidence. And comparing yourself to somebody who's been teaching for 30 years is unhelpful. It's like if you just started to play the violin, and then you look at some virtuoso playing on stage, thinking, Oh no, I don't sound like that. Well, of course, you don't!
So, you might be clumsy in how you understand the practice and how you're able to communicate the practice when you begin a training course. But come to that primary thing, you want to do this because you've practiced, felt the benefits, and wanted to share those benefits. All those are beautiful. You've come into contact with the practice and committed to it. That's beautiful. You've tasted the benefits and transformation of the practice yourself. Hallelujah. A reason for this is that you wish to be able to share that with other people, too.
In training teachers, I try to keep that central. I keep bringing them back to trust in the goodness of your practice. It is like a core phrase that runs through our training: trust in the goodness of your practice. Remembering that is a way for people to deepen their practice. That's one of the most beautiful things for me in training teachers is seeing how the goodness of their practice develops over a year or two of training as they get to see, Oh, yeah, all the ways we tend to emphasize our failures and our foibles and our limitations, etc., the imposter syndrome, the negative self-talk, but for all of that, to recognize the fruits of one's practice, and that allows them to deepen unhindered by one's self-doubt.
And then you see that that's where teaching comes from. So we provide a protocol, and we provide some pedagogy. We support people in understanding the wider context of their practice and filling out their theoretical understanding, and we support them in going through that process of deepening practice. But where does their teaching come from? What is their capacity to guide meditations, tune into students, etc.? It comes essentially and authentically from them, recognizing and trusting in their practice. And so that's what I'm trying to shepherd them in most essentially.
Fleet Maull 40:28
That's an essential message, thank you. In our modern society, we're fairly impatient. And ideas like long apprenticeships and things like that are not much in favor these days. And the most egregious form of that is probably somebody doing a weekend workshop and hanging out their shingle—that kind of phenomenon.
Fleet Maull 40:54
That probably doesn't happen all that often. But still, just to put that out there as the most extreme side of it. But still, there needs to be more patience to do long, deep training. And apprentice to more senior teachers, and so forth. In many disciplines, people are willing to do this, such as using the example of a violinist or a musician. If one aspires to become a Virtuoso Musician, one usually is in it for the long haul and will find the best teachers and train with them for a long time. Or even if one wants to be a physicist or mathematician, and those in higher forms of mathematics, when one respects that it's going to take time, it's gonna have to go through all the steps.
But there are other things we think I should be able to do. I'm smart, clever, and a little bit charismatic. And I can pull this off now. In interviewing A. H. Almaas, one of your teachers in the Diamond approach, I was impressed by his description of their training as quite lengthy. I had a lot of respect for their process of training and empowering teachers within the Diamond approach.
Martin Aylward 42:11
I once knew a teacher of the Diamond approach. She spent eight or nine years in school before beginning the seminary or teacher training, which was then 11 years long.
Fleet Maull 42:24
Not many people will sign up for that these days, and there aren't the structures for it. Often, things operate in a Western, mainstream, or secular context, so there's got to be a cost involved. It's different from going to a monastery where the lay people support the monastery, and if you are willing to go there and be a monk, then your needs are taken care of.
However, in a Western context, you must support yourself and the teaching teachers; a whole different economy is involved. That doesn't lend itself to these long apprenticeships. But just having said that, I wonder how you see the pathway of a teacher. In our programs, we at least try to inspire people who embrace being a lifelong learner and never having a sense of being done. But you're just continually learning and always going back to deepen your practice, going back to receive teachings, finding other teachers further down the road than yourself to study with, and so forth.
Martin Aylward 43:36
Beautiful. It's important to emphasize that those long apprenticeships are still available and happening, but you don't see them. Because people are doing those long retreats, they've dropped out for a few years or a couple of decades. They're off on their long retreat, they've gone to a monastery, or they're on staff at a retreat center. There are ways of doing that, whether it's going to Asia in that traditional way or spending time in a monastery. We have people who work here. So, it's a residential retreat center here. And we have a mixture. We have some paid staff who are all practitioners. We also have volunteers there, partly in retreat, yet they also have some work duties. And that's an integrative way of being in a field of practice, but also having roles, and they might do that for six months at a time, etc. Or they might do that for several years. So I have two tracks. There's mindfulness teacher training, and it might feel like an artificial distinction, but it's one that I use. Mindfulness teacher training is very different than Dharma teacher training. So, a mindfulness teacher training somebody can apply, and they'll typically have a few years of practice and have sat on some retreats. They'll have some immersive experience of meditation practice, etc.
It nevertheless can go along in a more professionalized sense. Within a few years of practice history and a year or so of training, one can be well-skilled enough to deliver introductory mindfulness instruction and guide people through some multi-week introductory course, class, etc. Accompanying people in a more intense thing, like a week-long Silent Retreat, and with a context in what I referred to earlier as this larger-than-psychological container. That's a whole other realm. And so, if I train people in that way, that's not something that people can apply for, sign up. If I get to know a committed student over time, I might mentor them individually. Or if I have a small group of people I've known for a long time, at least 10 years or so, I've known their practice for a long time, and who I'm supporting, steering towards teaching in that wider context.
So it's all good; some people's life situations or degree of connection to the practice will steer them in one way or another. It's all good. Like I said, you're getting into this because of your love of the practice and wish to share it. And getting into it means you become part of that transmission. Like I said, when I get to the end of the year of teacher training, and you graduate a bunch of teachers, and off they go, and they're sending out their ripples into the pool, and that sense of carrying forth some sense of lineage. And we might not use the word lineage so much in a secular sense. Nevertheless, that's what it is, right? I've learned from my teachers; I'm passing that on to other people going forth and teaching.
After 12 years of our mindfulness teacher training, and I've trained a few hundred graduates, there are a lot of ripples. The same goes for your, other friends', and colleagues' programs. And so there's a lineage in that, transmission in that, and passing on. And so, whether one's apprenticeship is long or short, whether one's teaching is secular or more overtly spiritual, it's all good. It's all good.
Fleet Maull 47:44
So this has been incredibly rich and helpful. Thank you so much, Martin. So, my final question is a personal one. So Martin Alyward, as a mindfulness teacher, as a Dharma teacher, a mindfulness teacher, and a meditation teacher, how are you different today from Martin 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or 30 years ago? How does that show up in terms of your teaching and how you support students in their path as you've evolved over the last three decades? You've been at it longer than that, but even I don't want to make you go back and remember too far.
Martin Aylward 48:27
Too far, it's too painful! Sure, I had the great good fortune to get into practice quite intensively when I was very young, 19. So it's been the whole of my adult life. So, I don't know what it's like to be an adult without having some meditative discipline and guidance at the very heart of my life. So, if I think back to my pre-life practice, it's just the wonder, the confusion, the agony, and the delight of adolescence. Yeah, I wouldn't go back there.
The degree of confusion was extraordinary for all the great exuberance of youth. So, in some ways, I can't know the benefits of just aging and gaining life experience, nor what the fruits of my practice are. But for me, I like to give all the credit and all the benefits to my practice; because of it, I would have to work some of that shit out just by living a life and attending to responsibilities. But there's something that feels beautiful to me. I'll give all the credit to my practice, and that easily maintains my love of Dharma practice.
And at the same time, I do not doubt that the taste of freeness flows through my life. And I experience that by living in my heart, mind, and body. You can't get into too much mental machinations. You can't make too much tension or drama out of things. You can't get into too much resentment or difficulty. You can't get into too much inner difficulty.
That would be different if I hadn't encountered the Dharma. The Dharma gave me a framework. It gave me a path, a way to train my attention, explore my consciousness, forgive myself for all my inner craziness, and cultivate the freeness that starts to run through our lives. It was clear to me at the beginning, and it's obvious now that genuine liberation of freeness runs through one's life. That's the promise. And that's the real possibility of a commitment to practice like this.
Fleet Maull 51:24
It was wonderful and incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much, Martin, for being part of our Teaching Mindfulness Summit. Many blessings on your work, and thank you so much for your good work in the world.
Martin Aylward 51:35
Nice, thank you, Fleet. I've enjoyed speaking with you, and I hope it's helpful to those listening. Thank you.
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