Confessions of a "Failed" Mindfulness Teacher

This is the week I didn’t graduate as a Mindfulness Teacher. As my former classmates and teachers shook hands and posed for photos, I was covered in black pastel dust on the floor of an art therapy room, many miles away, honouring my own learning over the past two years.  

Sydney J. Hall once said that the whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  We begin our learning journeys with a limited frame of reference, seeing somewhat static reflections of ourselves and what is immediately around and behind us. If we engage fully, and are fortunate in our basic abilities and opportunities, we open to looking with a wider perspective, seeing the vast world ahead of us, in all its colour and chaos, with shifting shades of light and dark. 

Of course, education is always something of a risky business. The day we began training, one of the faculty pointed this out to us. In two years time, she said, we would not be the same people.  Mindfulness Teacher Training is particularly explicitly “experiential” in focus, with a heavy emphasis on integration of academic and personal learning. In words that would come to haunt me, we were charged with learning to ‘communicate through our way of being’ the process of Mindfulness in such a way that reflected “being the person whose story you have lived’ (p.92, McCown et al., 2010).

Being a good and diligent student, I took the exhortation to focus on this very seriously indeed, applying all the usual rules that had worked for me before of immersing myself totally in the experience and doing everything I was supposed to do, everything that had usually worked for me in other academic contexts. I quickly learned that the old rules of engagement would not apply here. I learned the hard way I was often simply unable to do what I needed to do at the intensity that was required to continue as a Mindfulness Teacher.  

I had always had a tendency to get very sleepy, or "leave my body" during certain practices, but given that I had returned to meditation in adulthood pregnant and surrounded by babies and toddlers, for the most part I assumed it was just regular tiredness and thought little of it. It wasn't until I committed to the mandatory regular bodily practices that I began to notice that the more I attempted, the worse my attention to certain parts of my body seemed to become. Initially, I read everything I could find on ways of managing sleepiness in meditation - then I followed all best advice and dutifully packed myself off to therapy. And yet, the more talk therapy I engaged in aimed at articulating the story of me, and at what lay behind me, the more puppet-like I seemed to become in my own skin: immobilised, frozen and hollow.

Almost fifteen months later, after a difficult retreat experience when it became clear that deferral would be recommended because of these “difficulties affecting my learning”, I chose to exit the programme.  In truth, by that stage I knew better than those advising me the impossibility of continuing in that context at that time. Still, given that language and learning were just about the only areas of life that had always felt “doable” to me in any storm – effectively, my anchor in times of trouble - presenting with apparent difficulties achieving “communicating being me” felt catastrophic, apocalyptic even: permeated with the most excruciatingly devastating felt sense of personal failure and shame - utter and profound defeat on every possible level of self imaginable.

I was indeed “being the person whose story I had lived” - and what was there was not enough, and at the same time too much.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me now that the trouble with “training” in something like delivering the formal contemplative practices of Mindfulness Based Interventions within a time-limited organisational context is that one is dealing with complex issues of personal growth and transformation. Like a rose, a bud cannot be forcibly unfurled into a mature blossom. 

Learning is a consequence of contacted regularities within the environment (internal or external) and when a particular behavioural response to difficult psychological experience has been practiced over and over from early childhood, it is inevitable that attempting a new way forward will involve a lot of stumbling and falling, ups and downs, trials and errors and a whole lot of struggle that for any given person, may or may not be possible within a two or three year time-frame, especially where there is a strict programme that must be adhered to. In a sense it may be particularly true that for some of us, close personal mentorship allowing for supervised practice with feedback from a trusted, experienced teacher may be particularly important to ensure that we don't become entrapped within old, toxic habits of mind.

Beyond what we learn of a skill or a tradition, in coming to terms with the deepest meanings of our lives - what is, what was, what wasn't and could never be,  who we are and who we maybe cannot be at a given time or in a given context - we can meet with deep and profound grief and sadness that reflects all the unsatisfactoriness of being human, the pain of separation, the recognition of impermanence.

Experienced in the body, behind the eyes, these are not always so easy to verbalise for any of us: this raw purity of pain that seems too tender for our socially-oriented selves to handle alone, requiring slow comfort, and gentle witnessing from soft, kind eyes. Galway Kinnell’s poem, St. Francis and the Sow, is a favourite of Mindfulness trainers, that speaks to how we cannot always easily self-replenish at these times:


The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

I left my dreams behind, because in some deep part of me, I knew I had no more stories  I could see, know or hold, without the warmth and care of face to face interaction. Without experiencing I could still be seen as lovely despite it all.

And so it came to be that,  several months on, instead of walking the dais to shake hands and wave about a scroll, I found myself furiously pastelling a lurid rainbow over a bright, blue sea.

At the top right hand corner of the clean white paper, I had placed a rock, a conker and a snail shell. Working in layers, I watched the sea darken, give rise to overlapping layers of storm, obscuring and blackening the colour beneath. A pier at the centre of the piece became increasingly more of a plinth, seeming to rise from and part an angry and condemning sea.

Close to the end of the hour, the black of it was all over my hands, falling on my clothes, in my hair, on my cheeks. Gently, the therapist invited me to see that in all the intensity of revising and reviewing and layering over the main body of the picture, over and over, completely organically and out of my own awareness I had carefully and systematically avoided allowing any single hint of pastel dust (even when blowing it upwards on the page) to touch the 3d items in the top corner.

They remained still and pristine, unmarked… uncontaminated.

And there it was.

As Jung would have it, ““Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain”.

Before me I suddenly saw in whole cloth a full pictorial representation of how, over a whole year, I had invested so much of my being (at one point, almost every shred of available attention) in mentally attempting to prevent the most profound sadness and grief that had resurged in this failed process of learning to be a Mindfulness Teacher from “contaminating” these three objects. I had been vigilant to them always, monitoring them always, and I hadn't even noticed, the orientation of my energy having been so firmly misdirected towards the struggle of holding the storm at bay.  

Between the dark wildness of the water and these sheltered objects of earth, the rainbow shone from under the clouds:  both shield and distractor.

And I knew in the seeing what I could not know in the saying.

These three objects were my three small boys, the conkers we had split open together, the snails we had hunted, the rocks we had carefully categorised and documented. The rainbow was everything I knew of personal love and professional service, care and compassion: kindness, brightness, expansiveness, peace, energy and hope: freedom from the storm. And the dark rough sea below was the grief and suppressed rage of the most unrelenting, excoriating experience of depression and OCD I had ever had the misfortune to encounter.

Together I sat with my therapist on the floor, my hands covered in dust, and gently picked up the objects to see the white void beneath. Holding them tenderly in my dusty, stained hands, I cried bitterly and freely at all that I had lost in a struggle I didn’t even see come upon me.

My little boys never needed protecting from my whole-hearted yet fragile humanity.

The plinth in the waves became as I looked at it now a metronome in.my mind, tick-tick-ticking at the rate of my racing heart, marking all the time I had wasted on fighting a fight I never had needed to engage with, alive to threats there never really were.

When it comes to our most important learning in life, often “experience”, as comedian Steven Wright would have it, is something “you don't get until just after you need it."  In times of crisis and for the bigger decisions in life – what to choose as our focus, how to be, what to pursue, what to let go – we can find ourselves with no template for how to proceed.

As philosopher Laurie Paul outlines in conversation with Paul Bloom here, when it comes to answering the big questions, more often than not, we must leap forward with no solid ground beneath us:

Many of life’s biggest decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself. The lesson I draw is that life may be more about discovery, and coming to terms with who we’ve made ourselves into via our choices, than about carefully executing a plan for self-realization. With many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change in the process of doing it.

There is no possible way I could have predicted, that first day of Mindfulness Teacher training, where I would be on graduation day.  What I have learned about myself and others in the process of not “mastering” Mindfulness could fill many books with many words but in my “ungraduation”, this “unbecoming” of my future as a Mindfulness Teacher, most of those are no longer important.

What matters is allowing all those words to fall away, and to feel in their absence the vastness of what it is to be human, where there can be no griefs, sadnesses, madnesses, rages or weirdnesses that cannot be appreciated for their own essential and humble vitality: where the mundane and the sublime, the awesome and the defiled, are all, in a sense, equal and inseparable.


Untrue and deeply meaningful, or true and irrelevant. Where all that we are and have been is sacred and to be celebrated, the weeds and the blooms, whether they come to flower or not. Resolute in my commitment to appreciating this wonderful, messy, impossible life, I throw open my window - and choose celebration.

Poem: Celebration  (Svein Meyring)

I want to celebrate chaos. I want to celebrate old worn-out cars, Broken tiles, ever-shifting Schedules, misplaced letters, And nettles next to flower-beds; To celebrate toilets out of order, As well as friends who will remind me That mistakes are good, failures a success, And that a pure heart may prevail In the non-end. I want to celebrate being left alone, Or assailed by talkers (Or, disturbing others’ quiet). I want to celebrate gentle smiles, Good intentions, and especially, One step after the other. “If arrow number 100 hits the target, How can you say the first 99 were failures?”