Gurus and Teachers

At its core, meditation is as simple as any task could be, yet it inspires so much fanfare surrounding experts. I suppose you could just sit, but it seems that no one begins meditating that way. Nearly everyone I’ve met learned from an expert—guru, master, teacher, or what-have-you. I’m learning meditation from a very experienced teacher, but it would be fair (and relevant to this week’s learning theories topic) to ask what a meditation expert can provide to a novice.

Let’s explore a few of the reasons to revere experts that are discussed in chapter 2 of How People Learn. As the authors explain, “experts notice features and meaning patterns of information that are not noticed by novices,” which applies to meditation in a deep way (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 31). Becoming more proficient in meditation can feel like trying to swim in a field of grass. It’s awkward and you don’t feel like you’re really making progress. So it is helpful (critical, really) to have feedback about your experiences. My teacher is always making meaning of our personal experiences. She nods as we describe our troubles and then explains why and where we are stuck. Her experience allows her to make sense of our struggles and prescribe solutions. Falling asleep while meditating? Try a different time of day. Your mind refuses to relax? Try focusing on your breath, eyeballs, belly button, or heartbeat. Truth be told, I would have already given up on this if I didn’t have such an encouraging and positive teacher with an eye for patterns.

Another key ability of experts is knowing “the kinds of difficulties that students are likely to face” and tapping “into students’ existing knowledge to make new information meaningful” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 45). It’s not enough for a great teacher to repeat monologues (particularly for meditation). An expert teacher must be able to guide students’ learning through likely pitfalls, while making what students do know work for them. It’s no easy task, but I’ve been really surprised how well my mediation teacher does this. Using my naïve perception from a month ago of what a successful meditation student would be able to do, I would have thought of my whole meditation class and myself as complete failures by this point. But my teacher was not in the least bit surprised how far we’ve all fallen short of our lofty goals. When we reported to detail how poorly we’d done this week, she only prepared us more for similar struggles.

My expert meditation teacher also connects our difficulties with other difficulties. Meditation is like exercise or any other self-improvement—it takes dedication, practice, and self-forgiveness. Our teacher encourages us to ponder what has made us successful in these other areas and apply it to meditation.

How did you become addicted to exercising?

Well… doing it everyday no matter how much I hated it.

Exactly! That’s what you have to do for your meditation.

It’s a big help to really get metacognitive about your resistance to sitting and clearing your mind, which I’ve gotten better at this week. Having a teacher (and considerate peers) can really foster that sort of thought.

Where How People Learn discussed the great powers of experts, Ambrose touched on some of the blind spots or blunders of experts working as instructors. And I must admit I’ve been guilty of being a blinded teacher in classes I’ve taught. My meditation teacher is very good at not being blinded by her unconscious competence (perhaps she forces herself to remain partially conscious by being open to learning new things), but I have met and seen people who mediate well and assume it is very easy to do. Many of the videos available all over the Internet are great, but some assume a lot of component skills and practice that a beginner would really not have. How long is too long for a beginner? Well probably more than 10 minutes, but a lot of people on YouTube don’t seem to know that. It’s a critical part of being able to teach something—understanding the steps that are needed to get where you are. I believe it is what separates professionals, or even academics, from teachers.

I’m grateful to have an expert to learn from. My teacher is actually really excellent and supportive. I’m making great progress because of it. I typically get burned out on self-improvement stuff so fast, so having the scaffold built by a teacher really helps me stay focused and improving my skills at an appropriate rate.

Meditation and Motivation

Viewing my experiences thus far with mediation through a lens of learning theories regarding motivation is an apt focus point. Quite a few of the concepts we learned from the reading this week make sense to my learning experience.

Let me begin by making this clear: nothing, and I mean nothing, tests the limits of your intrinsic motivation like meditation. It is challenging enough to motivate yourself to do something productive, like mow the lawn or prepare tomorrow’s lunch—things that have some sort of tangible extrinsic motivation as well. You eat the food or admire your lawn. But it is nearly heroic to do literally nothing for half an hour everyday. Try it now. I dare you. Drop everything you are doing right now, close your eyes, and sit for the next thirty minutes. You won’t do it. Your mind begins to race with all of the reasons you couldn’t—nothing inspires. You’re thinking I have to finish this homework, make dinner, go to work, and sleep. These are the same thoughts that race through my mind every time I meditate, and that’s why it requires a heroic dose of intrinsic motivation.

At this point I know what you’re going to say dear learning theory expert, you’ll say but wait, achievement motivation, curiosity, and competence motivation can inspire you! And you’re half right. I do sit most mornings now because I am do possess the need for achievement. I want to be a successful in meditation. I’m hoping to gain all of the great things that people who meditate seem to have: confidence, self-discipline, and an undeniable calmness. The problem seems to be that I have my doubts that I’m capable of being one of those people. My expectancy-value perception is far too skewed. I view the value as exceedingly high, yet my expectation of my ability to claim those rewards is next to zero. I may also have a real fear of failure because of this. It hasn’t stopped me from meditating, but it has made it difficult.

So I need to work on my self-efficacy when it comes to meditation. Truthfully, it may be half rooted in the fact that I haven’t been this bad at anything I’ve tried in a long time. It’s easy to be confident in familiar activities, but something this foreign tests the belief you have in yourself. While I’m sitting with my eyes closed, all of my self doubt creeps up into my mind—after all there is no noise (stimulation from the outside world) to overcome these thoughts. It is difficult to not think to yourself, I’m not doing this right or I’ll never be like Buddha.

Me at a Buddhist Sanctuary (not sure if I belong)

Luckily, I’m getting plenty of positive influence (some of each of the four influences on self-efficacy) from my weekly class.  I have had a couple of enactive attainments. I’ve found myself in flow, a term which applies very well to mediation, several times. I’ve been able to slip into a Zen trance of clarity for longer lengths of time (several minutes). So that has added to my self-efficacy, as well as the vicarious experience of listening to my classmates’ (there are nine of us in the class) detail their meditation successes. Several of my peers are doing really great and a few are struggling as well. It’s encouraging to hear the experiences of both. If I didn’t hear other people talking about their challenges, I would probably have already given up. It’s such a help to know how other people are fairing.

The teacher of the class is very encouraging and her verbal persuasion builds a great deal of self-efficacy for all of us. She is very understanding, yet she helps us set high goals (I need to be sitting for thirty minutes everyday for one week within the next five weeks—no easy task!). The last of the four influences, physiological state, has an impact as well. When everything becomes quiet and you shut off all stimuli, your body does strange things. You notice your breathing, you notice how fast your heart is beating, and your stomach grumbles. Meditating can really make you anxious. Being good at it helps to curb that from happening, but I often start to feel really anxious. I feel the need to do the dishes and my homework; I begin to worry about work. It’s difficult, but eventually your body begins to enjoy the activity. Your physical body becomes a positive influence to your self-efficacy as it begins to relax. It can be really excellent when you have a great session.

I could go on forever about how motivation plays into mediation. In fact, I’ll probably discuss a few other terms that I missed this week.

Learning to How to Learn

My mind never shuts up. In fact, I find it pretty miraculous that I ever fall asleep or finish any task. But I’ve learned to work with my rambling, unfocused brain over the years, and sometimes, in brief moments, I’m actually able to think about things in a clear and logical way. In the summer I had really been making some headway in organizing my life, but it appears to all have come crashing down in the last month. Working at a (much more) stressful job and beginning graduate school have left much time for mental release.

It is in this chaos that I have begun to meditate, and I could not have started at more ideal time. Let me begin to discuss meditation (or Zen mediation, as it is my focus) with a disclaimer for the uninitiated: meditation is and is not what you think it is like. You need to do a little tuning and/or accommodation, as I have this week with regards to meditating. Meditating is sitting, sure. It is also calming and refreshing. Yet, meditation is also really difficult. It’s difficult like going to the gym is difficult. There is always an excuse to put it off until tomorrow. In fact, I’ve been putting off meditating for 10 years. I’ve always wanted to do it; I’ve just never taken the time to do it. If you can’t relate to that feeling, you’re a far better person than I am. Nevertheless, I have begun.

This was my first week of actually plopping down, closing my eyes, and watching my thoughts—which has been my first and most important lesson this week. Meditation is really just watching. To meditate is to pay close attention. So I’ve been watching my thoughts for around 30 minutes for the last three mornings, and last night I attended my first Zen mediation class session.

The class is going to be a really wonderful resource. There are 9 people in the class, and they all are very different people. I suppose I’m the youngest in the group, which did feel a little strange. There are two elderly people in the class and several people in their thirties. They all have really different reasons for learning to meditate, which they provided during our first meeting. All in all though, it appears that we all would like to improve the way we think and perceive the world around us.

The class provided me with several new tools and strategies to use for my personal sessions, although we did have a great class meditation session. I've been assimilating new concepts about what meditation can be and how it can be done. When meditating, I learned, it is useful to find an area of your body to focus on for a few breaths. It could be your breathing, which is the obvious and popular choice, but you could also move your eyeballs with your breath or check your heartbeat. These kinds of strategies help loosen your mind and enter (what I’m calling) the zone. 

My Zen teacher (or should I so guru?) began the class by explaining how the class was about “learning how to learn,” which made it really strange when I later explained that part of my motivation to take the class was my Learning Theories class. It only became stranger when she recommended that we all make a goal for ourselves to accomplish in the next eight weeks because our Professor had just asked us to do the same thing. Although now, having attended a very enlightening class, I have a much clearer goal. I want to be regularly meditating every morning for at least thirty minutes, and I want to be able to stay in the zone for at least 10 of those 30 minutes regularly.

I’ll explain the zone, the Zen, and the self-hypnosis, which is within my teacher's meditation schema, aspects of my ongoing journey in next week’s update. Also, I’ll discuss how close I am toward meeting my goals.