Should Mindfulness Teachers Show Vulnerability?

Should I show my vulnerability teaching mindfulness as a way to instill trust from others? Should I be forthcoming about my weaknesses, my challenges, as a way to build rapport with people who I'm helping to teach mindfulness to? How do we navigate this territory? How much do we share? How much do we show that we know things? It's a tricky dance. And so I'd love to help you in navigating that territory to help you identify how vulnerable you should be when you're helping others to be present and self-compassionate and resilient. How much should you divulge what's appropriate in certain circumstances? I've certainly made that mistake and learned the hard way many times in my years of teaching mindfulness. I've taught for the Mindfulness Program born at Google. I was a monk for a couple years in the Buddhist Thai tradition. I was at Spirit Rec Meditation Center for five years, full-time, supporting Jack Cornfield and a lot of the senior teachers there. And I've seen other teachers kind of navigate this territory very differently. Some teachers are very closed off and they don't really show much persona or personality or you know authenticity, quite frankly. They kind of uh play a role as a um guru, if you will. Other teachers are the opposite, where they're very um loosey-goosey. Maybe they might go into the deep end on divulging everything and sharing maybe too much about uh their insecurities, their shortcomings, their bad habits. Where it's like, wait, why am I learning mindfulness from you? What's going on here? Should I be teaching you how to be mindful? Um, most mindfulness teachers are a little bit in the middle where they're themselves, they're authentic. They divulge a little bit about what they've learned from the past, how they've overcome challenges, um, but they're also real and not too forthcoming. So there's definitely a delicate balance here. But I want to share a clip with you of an interaction that I had with someone who's in our mindfulness teacher certification program who had this question like, how vulnerable should I be in order to instill trust from others? Do we need to be vulnerable to get trust? You know, it's a tricky terrain here. So I'd love to share this clip with you of uh a raw, impromptu interaction uh with someone who had this question. I want to share uh my thoughts on this and get your feedback. You know, does this resonate with you? How vulnerable are you when you teach mindfulness? How vulnerable do you want your teachers, your mindfulness and meditation teachers to be in sharing their own life story? Some of us crave more stories and vulnerability, and some of us are repelled by it. But I'd love to get your take on how you relate to this. And if you're teaching mindfulness, how vulnerable are you? How scary is it to be vulnerable? Um, you know, have you found that balance for yourself? And then if you want to teach mindfulness and meditation with this balance of vulnerability and um and instilling trust, then uh we'd be honored to support you in our mindfulness teacher certification program. The link is below. But regardless, I hope that you enjoy the following clip. Um, and I hope that it provides a lot of value for you. Thank you. Yeah, there's so much to unpack with trust and what trust is or what it means, you know, and then there's parallels with confidence, faith. Read for me, reading the book Loving Kindness was really helpful for sensing into the layers of trust. Which for me over the years is less and less in the head and more and more in the heart. I think it's really easy to think of trust as sort of a logical analysis. For me, trust exponentially increases if it's felt in the heart, you know, if it's hard to trust, you know, often there's you know repair work that can be done, forgiveness work, you know, forgiving others, asking for forgiveness, and forgiving self in journaling. Like what what are the conditions for trust for certain people for ourselves? What are the things that we ultimately have unshakable trust in, if anything, and why some people include mindfulness in that category or presence or whatever's what words we want to use, but some people put mindfulness in that category. What do we trust about ourselves? That could be really rich exploration. But you know, when we're teaching mindfulness or sharing it with others, yeah, we can reflect on, you know, like what would I want in a teacher to trust them? And it just kind of connects with the vulnerability piece that you're talking about, and you know, are they pretending to be a certain way? You know, like you know, can I be vulnerable in certain ways to invite a sense of trust? You know, not to be overly self-deprecating, but to be real, and you know, some some mindfulness teachers will kind of fake it till they make it in the sense that like they feel like they need to be a certain way, they need to be like a famous mindfulness teacher they like, or they need to I don't know, be like a monk, or they need to kind of be perfect in how they move and you know they need to be calm all the time and smooth and all that all that stuff. You know, and people can usually tell that they're faking it. You know, my favorite mindfulness teachers are the ones that can laugh at themselves or just laugh at life, you know, not in a sarcastic demeaning way, but just find the humor in life. So, you know, maybe not being overly serious or overly profound thousand percent of the time. You know, there's these cycles of depth and lightness.