In this episode, Christiane Wolf, PhD, speaks with Vita Pires, PhD, the executive director of the Prison Mindfulness Institute, about the practical implementations of mindfulness teaching and investigates the practice's origins.
Mindfulness origins and secular applications.
Ethics in mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness and attention in meditation.
Mindfulness meditation practice and teaching.
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Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD, is a former physician and internationally known mindfulness and Insight (Vipassana) meditation teacher. She is board-certified as an OB/GYN and holds a PhD in psychosomatic medicine from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Dr. Wolf is the lead consultant and teacher trainer for the National Mindfulness Facilitator Training at the US Department of Veteran Affairs. She is the “Outsmart Your Pain - Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind” and the co-author of the classic training manual for mindfulness teachers “A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness”. http://www.christianewolf.com
Podcast Transcript
Vita Pires 0:00
Hi everyone, this is Vita. I'm here today with Christiana Wolf. Christiana is an international teacher of Mindfulness. She's written some great books, including 'A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness'. Welcome, Christiana.
Christiana Wolf 0:19
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Vita Pires 0:21
Would you like to discuss your book? It has had a very helpful impact on our training. Would you like to discuss its origins?
Christiana Wolf 0:28
I'd be very happy to talk about that book. So the 'Clinicians Guide to Teaching Mindfulness.' I have to say that I wish we had chosen a different title and not used the word ‘clinicians.’ Because sometimes people feel like, 'Oh, I'm not a clinician, so that book is not for me,' but we can't go back on that one. It came out of our work at the Veterans Administration. I have been involved locally in Los Angeles, where I live, and then over the years, spreading throughout the West Coast, and, for the last several years, we have led, or we are leading, annual mindfulness facilitator training at the VA. There are hundreds of people, and it's amazing. Many say it's the best training they've ever had at the VA.
But the thing is, when we started, people kept asking, Have you written that down? And we had not. At some point, we just answered, Okay, and we wrote a book about the training. And so the book is meeting a demand that was there with people who were training with us and who needed something a little bit more practical and hands-on. And, like we call it often, it is a security blanket. It is something to hold in your hand when you go into a class and teach. And, yeah, it's been well received.
Vita Pires 2:05
Well, thank you very much for that. I know that's been very useful for us with the teachers wanting to teach in underserved populations, such as veterans, prisons, etc. Can you talk a bit about the Buddhist roots of the teaching and how that applies to working with secular mindfulness?
Christiana Wolf 2:23
Yeah, so that's always a big question. One very important thing is that nobody needs to be a Buddhist to practice and teach mindfulness. And we've had many people from all kinds of different religious and spiritual backgrounds who say mindfulness training has helped their beliefs and practice. So that's important.
We also have to be very clear that these teachings, in particular, the teachings that come from the MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction background, that Jon Kabat Zinn founded, come from Buddhist teachings. What's important is that we like to say the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist; he was just a human being. So, there is no God in Buddhism. And the Buddha was just a human being who had constructive, and commonsensical insight into how the mind and the heart work. Then, he used his language, which was also influenced by the spiritual tradition of his time, which was Hinduism.
So we have those words, those terms. And then, people being people, they made the Buddha into something like a superhuman. But the Buddha didn't want any cult around his person. And he didn't ask that. He said you can't make any statue. So all of that came later. So it's really important to be very clear with that. And then what Jon Kabat Zinn did, basically he was a Buddhist practitioner, a Zen practitioner, and also an insight meditation, Vipassana tradition, which is also my tradition. And he just realized that we're blocking many people because we usually use vernacular. We're using words like Buddhism, and people are not interested in becoming Buddhists. They want to suffer less and struggle less.
And so he said, let's take all that out and use a language everybody understands. Then, he took one of the core words, Sati, translated as mindfulness. However, what he also did in his definition of mindfulness was use some other terms from the Buddhist teachings, which are not so well known and confounded that into what we call mindfulness today. So when practicing mindfulness, we're practicing something that the Buddha taught.
Also, to make it work for people so they would be open-minded and not be reminded of their religion, he took out all rituals. He also took ethics out, which we see increasingly in that mindfulness is taught as if it were devoid of ethics. But the truth is, ethics was the first thing the Buddha taught. So, you cannot practice mindfulness in the way it was intended without an ethical framework. And, of course, here in the West, we are conditioned by so much particular Christianity.
A religion that has a God and that has sin and has good and evil; none of that exists in Buddhism. But of course, we have the five Buddhist precepts, which are training principles. But when people hear the five precepts, they immediately think of the Ten Commandments. And so Jon Kabat Zinn wanted to avoid people being discouraged by this and so he took it out. Then, the question is, how do we teach that? Or how do we convey that without sounding as ethics?
Vita Pires 7:07
Yes, because you wouldn't want to get into good and bad and the Ten Commandments. Ethics in Buddhism is not just a list of precepts; mindfulness will allow you to discern what will happen when you do something. You can discern whether it's skillful, nonskilled, or healthy. You know, there's language that can be used that doesn't harken back to the need to go to confessional.
Christiana Wolf 7:37
Absolutely. Something is missing from the original intention. Let's now train people to be aware of that. Given the context we're teaching in, how can we make it so that people can understand what this is about?
Vita Pires 8:15
So, what are the ways that you can train ethics? I know that the methods in philosophy are completely different from those in Buddhism.
Christiana Wolf 8:24
The core thing is actions have consequences. So Jack Kornfield has this funny phrase: he says, 'Well, it's really hard to sit down to peaceful meditation after a day of lying, stealing, and killing'. Because that will affect whatever we do. So we might not go around and kill and steal, right? But even the small things, when we think deeply about them, are against our core values, 'What are my intentions?' And what are my values? What kind of person do I want to be? And how is that person acting in the world?
Yeah, and that's how I often talk about that; I ask, 'Where are you?'. It has so much to do with integrity and alignment. It's not about right or wrong or moralizing but being curious about when you do something. What's the effect of that? How does that make me feel? How does that stay in my system? Does that show up in my meditation practice? Because that was something that the Buddha was very clear about. He said you can't have a good meditation if your life is out of alignment with your values. And, of course, what we're practicing is nonviolence. We're practicing non-greed, we're practicing generosity. Yeah, the opposite of nonviolence is that we practice love and care for each other. So, those are ingrained in the teachings. And then I think it’s up to us to see how that shows up in life and practice, so it's more like this inquiry we do with ourselves.
Buddha taught us to look at what we do with our thoughts, words, and actions. And you get to choose that. Yeah, because no judge says you're bad and are being punished. No, you carry your consequences.
Vita Pires 11:17
The distinction was beneficial for me in that mindfulness is not the same as attention. Often, when I teach in a juvenile hall, some people say, 'I heard somewhere that mindfulness is going to make you a better shooter.'
Attention is skill-building; you can be good at corporate greed, shooting, and other things. But mindfulness is a team player with all kinds of things like care. Mindfulness is what they call a 'not ethically variable' state of mind and attention. You can be very attentive and do something that is not skillful. You can be very attentive to something that will harm others. But mindfulness includes, as a team player, care, loving kindness, interest and generosity, and all those things. Jon Kabat Zinn would call the attitudinal factors.
Christiana Wolf 12:19
Absolutely.
Vita Pires 12:21
It doesn't stand alone.
Christiana Wolf 12:25
Attention is like a very small subgroup. I shouldn't say very small because focus means you can focus and notice where your attention is. This is important. But then again, it doesn't stop there. And that is what it feels like at times; it feels like mindfulness is now being taught in that way. It's like paying attention or being better able to focus on whatever you choose to focus on. Yes, that is it's training, but that is not the goal.
Vita Pires 13:01
That includes so much more. How do you present? Do you propose presenting the precepts to people in a mindfulness class? Because that's where people go, 'Oh, my gosh, I was just coming here to learn how to relax. I'm not someone who lies, steals, or does anything. So why am I getting this '10 commandments’ again?’
Christiana Wolf 13:30
No, unless I teach a class on that topic. If I train mindfulness teachers, I'm very straightforward. Say we have this list. And let's work with that. I'm just asking people to see again the bigger context. So they can become more effective teachers, which is true for a lot of other Buddhist teachings that are not obvious or that we're not naming in a secular mindfulness class but that are inherently in there or should be in there. Or if the person teaching mindfulness doesn't know about it, their teaching will be more flat or one-dimensional. There's a lot of loss there when we're teaching that way.
But in a regular class or an MBSR class, it's always asking people if they are noticing; how does that make you feel? As you pay attention, what is arising, and how are you holding that. We know as teachers how important that is; we listen for these topics to arise, and then we can gently guide or point people back to say again, like, what are you noticing as this is arising? What happens to you as you bring this curious, open quality to the experience?
I guess it's not being judgmental about it, but rather inviting people in to explore. And they will often start seeing these things for themselves. Yeah, they go, I don't want to yell at my kids; this is why many people come to, for example, in MBSR, class, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class, right? They say I can see I'm doing harmful things. And I don't want to do that. And I don't know how to stop it because it's such a pattern.
Vita Pires 15:35
One inroad I found is talking about intentions, having people understand in the class, and clarifying their intentions before going into a conversation. Especially where there's going to be some conflict or something challenging. In any conversation, clarifying your intention is vital because sometimes we can come in with aggressive intent, not even aware of that. You know, like I'm going to push my ideas on a person, then we will get into a conflict because it's a bantering of ideas that can erupt. When people can stop and understand the intention a little deeper, they can stop and clarify it for a few minutes. I think it shifts things.
Christiana Wolf 16:15
Beautiful. Yeah. So often, mindfulness is also called a guardian. So then this guardian, when we think about it, we're priming our brain. So it's less likely we'll fall into that trap. We go primed or prepared or, with that attention, awakened into that conversation.
Vita Pires 16:40
I was listening to a talk with Christina Feldman the other day, and she said, 'Mindfulness does not coexist with habit,' especially reactive habits; it just cannot coexist with that because it's happening on autopilot with habitual responses.
I'm building an online course for prisoners and have permission to use the ethics curriculum that some prisoners developed. They developed it from reading the Dalai Lama's book Ethics for the New Millennium, which I haven't read, but I did read their curriculum. For people to understand, this was not a Buddhist group; it was a group working with ethics and some meditation and ethics.
They mentioned dependent origination. I read it and thought the way they explained it was really useful. They broke it down out of the Buddhist language to say that for everything to happen, this happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens.
That's exactly how it works. It understands the cognitive-behavioral spectrum, which is very helpful. Then ethics fall naturally into place.
Christiana Wolf 18:13
I honestly think it does when we start turning towards that. And that's been my experience teaching.
Vita Pires 18:24
So, can you explain why ongoing, formal meditation practice would be useful for meditation teachers?
Christiana Wolf 18:32
I don't think you can be a meditation teacher without formal meditation. I have a very strong opinion about that. And the thing is, what I often hear is that people say, like, 'Oh, I am mindful all day long. I'm just trying to be mindful as I go through my day', which is great. So I'm not dissing that at all. But when people come and tell me this, especially people who are trainers, I say add up the seconds that you're being mindful during the day. And the fact that it is hard every hour to have mindful moments. Add that up during your waking hours. Right? It's almost ridiculous, the little amount that it adds up to.
Yeah. Again, each form of meditation has different goals. One thing is for sure: We need training time to be efficient. Do you need to put in the time to learn a foreign language? Yeah, it makes a difference whether you do it for five minutes every day or an hour every day. That's commonsensical.
So where do you get your training? And do you think that once you start teaching, you don't need training anymore? No, you lose your skills. You need to use those skills. I often ask people from their own experience: Some people need to start small; they need to start with one minute of sitting still. And that is plenty. Yeah, but they can grow over time.
And then for other people, they can start with 45 minutes daily. And that's a huge ask, even more so today, with our limited, shrinking attention span compared to that 30 or 40 years ago. We need to sit with this mind and practice being with it and noticing how it changes. And then a lot of people notice that, 'Oh, my mind needs like 15 or 20 minutes to start, even to settle'. And then there is another settling that happens after 40 minutes.
And people who never meditate that long experience what happens when you're just being present, without asking anything, just feeling the breath, noticing your mind wanders and bringing it back. Trying to do that kindly.
And then think about it: if you do that for 20 minutes, half an hour, or 40 minutes, that's a big chunk of time. So, we need this as our lab to keep exploring how our mind works. Because then, as we add in what happens in everyday life, things get faster, and they get more complex, and people talk to us. So, it gets harder to be present for an extended time. And then everybody who does have a form of practice that I've talked to you about says it makes them spontaneously more mindful during the day, which is one of the side effects of mindfulness. Right.
For those reasons, we need to keep practicing. Then, the other thing is not to ask your students anything you're not doing yourself. That's a big push that I see when training MBSR teachers. So if you ask somebody to do something for 45 minutes daily, you must do that yourself. And you need to see how hard that is, how life gets in the way, how you fall off, and how you get back on like all these things. And then, coming back to what we talked about ethics earlier. Yeah, otherwise, you will have friction. If you ask people to do something, you can't do it yourself.
Some things come to my mind about why it's important to keep up a former practice; it's not about perfection; it doesn't have to be every day. So that's also something that gets in the way because they say, Oh, if I cannot do perfectly, I'm not doing it at all. When we start to see that, returning to the habit, as you said with Christina Feldman earlier, brings awareness to that. Notice what's in the way; why is that so hard? Make that part of the exploration.
Vita Pires 23:40
And also, if someone is going to guide meditation practice for people, they need to practice themselves. And that's helpful to do it that way because then you can feel what's going on: 'Oh, now bring the attention back.' And when a student teacher is doing that themselves, the people in the room can feel that. You're not just reading a script or memorizing a script.
Christiana Wolf 24:13
This is just terrible.
Vita Pires 24:15
Because I've seen that.
Christiana Wolf 24:20
No, being guided, I know if somebody's reading a script. I've gotten good at it. So, if you look at some of the meditation apps, you know people are reading a script and doing it well.
Vita Pires 24:43
Because it's too perfect. When you watch them you see, nothing is going on. Or if they say take a comfortable position, they’re not necessarily in a statute position. You know, they are feeling their way into it a little bit.
Christiana Wolf 25:01
I want to add one thing about guided meditation: I've heard people say, 'Oh, I'm meditating when I'm guiding my group; that's my meditation time.' No, that's not your meditation time because you're holding space for the group. And you're not going in as deeply. So we have this concept described in the book: you go halfway in a meditation. So you can't just be on the surface, that's where you would read a script, you're not doing it yourself, because you can feel it, your students can feel it. So you want to drop in and meditate, but you don't want to go so deeply that you lose contact with the group. So you have to go be halfway in. But this is not completely your meditation because you're tracking the room and holding space. So it's nice that you get that plus time in. But this does not count as your formal meditation for the day; I just wanted to say that for the record.
Vita Pires 26:07
People sometimes have a hard time if they come from doing a lot of insight practices by sitting up there and having their eyes closed. And we always recommend you should you're still tracking the room. So you're still there. And you, especially if you're teaching somewhere like a prison, need to keep your eyes open because then, at least, it provides safety for the room. They know somebody's got their eyes open to know what's going on.
Christiana Wolf 26:28
Thank you. No, thank you, actually, for bringing that up. So if we're teaching at the VA group of vets, I want to have my eyes open, or I know the group well enough, so it can close my eyes briefly. If I'm teaching in my community center, I have my eyes closed the entire time because I can hear, feel, and sense the room. But that is a skill that we're learning. And what you're saying in the prison setting is there is a higher degree of trauma in the room, so people feel less safe in their bodies. So it's so skillful that you're the person with open eyes, keeping everybody safe.
Vita Pires 27:21
So, when talking about practicing formal practice, can you say something more about that? I think people think they have to have this discipline of practice and diligence and all that sort of thing. Can you say something more along the lines of gentle discipline?
Christiana Wolf 27:38
This is something that feels very alive to me. I'm an ultra-marathoner. So I've run distances of longer than marathon distance, 50 miles, 60 miles, and people go, 'How does that go with being kind to yourself, with all that training?' So, for me, I'm big into discipline. I think we can't get skilled at anything if we lack discipline. And so there is something beautiful about the repetition in the service of deepening our skill set, where we can also say it's almost a dedication. So, for meditation practice, it's my commitment and dedication. Again, this is what I want to do, returning to integrity or intention, as I have decided this is worth my time. I don't have to be here. But I feel called to share that with others since I am here. So there is this love or this connection.
And to keep that in mind. And then I need to notice why because I know so many people want to know where I'm coming from. I've been so hard and harsh on myself. So this discipline had sharp edges, so practicing self-kindness and self-compassion helped me to soften that. Yeah, so it doesn't become this chore that I have to do, which I have to push myself to, but rather just something like being gentle and inviting myself to create space to feel into what's going on in myself concerning this life that I'm living.
Returning to mindfulness as a tool to be skillful and curious to see what gets in the way. What gets in the way of me just showing up to my cushion every day or my chair? You probably have heard the story that Joseph Goldstein talks about a period in his life when he had a really hard time meditating every day, which is he vowed to himself that he would sit down on his cushion every single day because he had control over that. And so that's what he did. And then, more often than not, he said, 'Now that I'm already here, I might as well start meditating a little bit'. In that way, he found a way to introduce this idea of gentle discipline.
Vita Pires 30:41
Yeah, that's beautiful. So you probably get asked this a lot, and you have given a lot of good tips. But do you have any tips that you'd say if someone said, 'What is your best advice for somebody who wants to learn to be a mindfulness teacher?'
Christiana Wolf 30:57
Do your work. Do your work. Yeah. In Buddhist times, up to maybe 50 years ago, someone started teaching meditation by invitation from your teacher. So you didn't decide you were ready to teach, but your teacher did because he or she knew you and your practice and said, 'Now you're ready, you need to do this next step.'
Vita Pires 32:25
Well, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. It's great to talk to you.
Christiana Wolf 32:30
Thank you so much for inviting me