Help me find the right meditation teacher
April 11, 2009 9:01 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for a skilled meditation teacher in the vicinity of Sydney, Australia. Preferably someone who knows how to work with students experiencing emotional trauma. Advice about directly helping a very anxious and hostile person meditate would also be welcome. There's a lot...

...more inside.

A family member just expressed interest in doing a long meditation retreat. He is really struggling emotionally at the moment with emotional material I have come to grips with through meditation, and he is hoping to achieve the same effects. However, he has very limited experience with meditation. He doesn't practice regularly. I'm worried that jumping into a long retreat without a solid foundation is just going to strengthen the behaviors he'd like to address.

He gets very anxious, and tries to cope with this using alcohol and weed. When that doesn't work, he becomes hostile. It can be hostility towards himself, or to people close to him. He has been having suicidal thoughts off and on, and is frequently hostile towards the family member he lives with, and who supports him financially. This is obviously a very unstable situation. I have been encouraging both of them to seek some kind of family therapy. (I would set it up and go with them, but I'm overseas.) He was seeing a therapist who specializes in PTSD by himself for a while, but stopped.

While growing up, we did not learn to respect ourselves or others. Our default way of being in the world has been to try to control ourselves and others through hostility and manipulation. There is some really powerful shame, anger and fear associated with all of this. I have mostly unlearned the reactions those emotions used to cause, but it's taken the better part of a decade, and it caused some pretty serious imbalances at times. I did this almost entirely without a teacher, though. I'm partially wondering whether the right teacher could help someone with this kind of stuff, and do it faster and with less pain than I experienced.

What worries me about the long retreat scenario is that he'll be in this environment where, of his usual coping mechanisms, the only one available will be self-hostility, and it will just deepen his trauma and self-hatred. Please let me know if there are any teachers within, say, 500km of Sydney who could help him cope with this situation, whether in retreat or in regular daily practice.

He has also proposed that he could just start to practice himself without a teacher, or that I could be his teacher. I would be happy to help him, but I am worried that I might lead him astray because our backgrounds are so similar that we might share important blind spots. I'm pretty sure he needs at least sporadic contact with a qualified teacher. But there's no reason why I can't give him advice, I suppose. I'm planning to recommend Mindfulness In Plain English, for starters. I'd welcome any advice about how I could help him with this.
posted by anonymous to Human Relations (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe he needs a DBT counselor.
posted by availablelight at 9:11 AM on April 11, 2009


To expand on that: DBT= dialectical behavior therapy, which includes a mindfulness component (i.e. meditation, etc.) but also mood and impulse management. A DBT practitioner would have experience teaching meditation to someone with this individual's coping and emotional limitations.
posted by availablelight at 9:21 AM on April 11, 2009


These are not spiritual issues; these are emotional/psychological issues. Retreat situations are for relatively emotionally healthy people. Your family member needs counseling in the short term. Counseling is a solution on a timescale of months. Meditation is a "solution" on a timescale of years, though, granted, certain beneficial effects may manifest relatively quickly.

Meditation and counseling complement each other, but they do not replace each other. Your family member should see a licensed counselor or therapist locally, being smart and picky and looking for some rapport, but one way or another making it happen.

On the meditation side, as long as energy is going into the counseling side, if you can't find a good meditation teacher locally, a phone-based retreat approach is really pretty amazing:

http://www.basicmindfulness.org/
posted by zeek321 at 12:18 PM on April 11, 2009


The meditation retreat I went to stressed that it wasn't a good solution for psychological issues. I too have seen meditation help people overcome issues with meditation, but I'm not sure that going into it TO overcome that stuff works, or whether you have to go into meditation wanting to learn more about meditation, with the psychological relief coming as a side benefit.
posted by salvia at 1:38 PM on April 11, 2009


I am definitely no expert, but I am in the middle of an 8-week group/class modeled on The Mindful Way through Depression. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that practice is called that because it really must be conducted consistently, over a long term, to have a real effect. If one could successfully address complex and difficult issues over the course of a retreat (even a long one), everyone would be doing it.

I can't help with your search with a local teacher, but I do highly recommend this book. I'm not a big fan of self-help books in general, and I'm pretty familiar with basic psychology, but it's presented some information and perspectives that were new and extremely helpful to me. I'm in the middle of it, but so far I've particularly appreciated its explanations of 1) why the "how do I analyze and fix myself" approach isn't successful and 2) why that same goal-oriented perspective can't be the purpose within meditative practice. Meditation can seem full of paradoxes (I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't hope it would benefit me) and the book helps me resolve those when I feel muddled up.

That said, for me the class is an indispensable complement to the book; otherwise I would never have stuck with the practice long enough to get started. The perspective offered by the teachers is also different, but equally helpful. Only throwing out ideas here--I was lucky to stumble across this course--but perhaps you would have luck by inquiring with local Zen or Buddhist centers, by googling "mindfulness" and regions of interest, or even by asking with local yoga studios?
posted by Herkimer at 6:30 PM on April 11, 2009


« Older The Ancient Indian Burial Ground of relationships   |   I need a cheap telecine. Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.