Meeting Your Mindfulness Students Where They Are

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. Your space to deepen your presence, elevate your mindfulness teaching, and embody mindfulness with confidence, authenticity, and integrity. Join us as we explore insights and tools to transform lives, including your own. I'm Sean Fargo, and today we'll be diving into an unusual topic for mindfulness teachers. Understanding your students' levels and growth. As mindfulness teachers, it's essential to honor each person's unique journey, recognizing their individual needs and experiences, traumas and sensitivities, and growth potential. In this discussion, we'll explore practical frameworks and approaches to guide your students with care, curiosity, and compassion. Each individual comes to mindfulness with a unique background, set of experiences, and different goals. Recognizing this diversity is both a skill and an ongoing practice for us as guides. Today I'd like to share some reflections and strategies for understanding people's levels of growth, where they're at in their mindfulness practice, and where an appropriate next step might be for them. Whether you're leading a group session, facilitating one-on-one practice, or simply supporting a loved one on their mindfulness journey, these approaches can help you honor and nurture the unfolding process for each person you work with. To begin, let's consider the value of personal practice for ourselves as guides. Our own ability to guide others stems from our own mindfulness and meditation practice. The more we practice, especially on retreats, on our longer sessions, if we can meditate a half hour, hour, two hours, if we can continue pushing the amount of practice that we have, then the more we're going to experience ourselves. And the more we experience ourselves, the more we understand these layers of emotion, the levels of opening, deepening that we experience in meditation, just awareness. We're able to recognize that in others. I don't know that I would necessarily say that someone else has only experienced 10% of what they were claiming. I would honor whatever practice people are doing and honor whatever people think they're experiencing and offer a perspective that may be helpful for complementing their journey. I think diagnose is the wrong word here, but I think it's really helpful, first of all, as say a guide or a facilitator or a teacher to notice whenever we assume something, or even if we're 99% sure something's happening, to keep that 1% open of the same. A lot of teachers get in trouble by assuming too much or thinking they know. I've gotten in trouble myself with that working as a coach. When we're working with someone, it's really helpful to remember that we don't know. Even if they're saying they know, I try to try to assume that maybe they don't fully know. And I don't know either. Maybe there's mystery to this, and we can try some things to see what works. So I think that's a really important foundation. But there's a lot of clues and there's different frameworks, and I'll just go through a few of them here. Some coaching schools will go through a framework body, heart, head. Some people will say head is mind. I don't do that, but it's like thoughts, heart, body. These are very simplistic breakdowns, but noticing if something feels like it could use a little bit of attention of body awareness, heart awareness, or um, say mental awareness. Noticing trauma is really, really helpful. So, you know, in meditation, a lot of people with trauma will bounce around, or it's hard to stay still, or it's hard to settle in the body. They'll much more prefer an active kind of meditation, whether it's you know, thinking something or physically moving, you know, walking meditation, yoga, etc. You know, and some people will know that they have trauma and some people won't. And not forcing someone to like be still, but like incorporating that awareness that they have trauma into like how you proceed. Maybe you do walking meditation for a while, maybe you talk about trauma if it's uh it's appropriate, asking what they've tried in the past, um, what's worked for them, what doesn't work for them, what kinds of meditations they want to do, what they're scared of. Those can be interesting clues. There's also like frameworks. Do they feel safe? Do they feel connected with others? Do they feel content? Like if they had to rate those three, like how would they rate them? Maybe working with one of them if they're open to it. So like safety would be like the limbic, the magdullah area, contentment would be the like mammalian brain, and then the connection would be the neo-mammalian. At different points in my journey, like for the first third of my coaching journey, I used the head, heart, body framework. For a while, I did the safety, contentment, connection framework, try to infuse trauma sensitivity throughout, you know, and sometimes that will just take precedence, depending on the on the client. And then um, yeah, like listening for words, how emotionally intelligent are they? How self-aware are they? Are they saying everything's fine or good or not good? You know, listening for every word and letting their words tell you, like if they use the word should a lot, then there's probably a strong inner critic. There's a lot of judgment, and then listening for layers of shame, worthiness is a big one. And there's often a strong correlation with trauma here. A lot of people will focus on the good, on the positive, no bad feelings. I don't want to assume that some people that might be the case, and there but there's many possibilities for why people do that. It's not necessarily denying, some people will just be scared to open up to what's unpleasant or a variety. Yeah, yeah. Are you holding on to like the good, the pleasant, the what should be here, and exploring that can be really helpful. So anyway, using language, like listening to what words they're using, noticing patterns, again, not trying to assume that we know what they're doing or why they're doing it, but exploring it together, inviting a curiosity for what's here is um it's easy for us to become like armchair therapists or that we know. And so it's really helpful to explore together, like, oh interesting. What is that? If we think we know and if we vocalize that, oftentimes it ironically creating disconnection between us and them. And oftentimes there's a subtle layer of say, either judgment or just assumptions. So just being really, really, really careful with that. Like, oh, let's let's find out together what this is, or you you said that word earlier. Can you say more about what you mean behind that? What's what's on what's underneath that? Or might it be related to something over here? Or let's explore this to you know, this puzzle together and see what we can find. It's really, really important, in my opinion. You know, and then there's other ways, you know, of of assessing or discerning. You know, you can uh ask people to take an Enneagram test, or there's all sorts of um assessments or quizzes, or yeah, you know, you can show people a map of emotions or a a wheel of emotions and uh, you know, ask them to sense into things in a more nuanced way. There's lots of tools out there. Thank you for joining me in today's discussion on understanding your students' levels and growth. I hope this exploration has offered valuable insights to help you connect more deeply with your students and guide them with greater awareness and sensitivity. If you're ready to deepen your teaching practice and bring mindfulness to others in a meaningful way, consider joining our mindfulness meditation teacher certification at mindfulnessexercises.com. Until next time, stay present, stay grounded, and continue showing up with authenticity and compassion. Thank you for listening.