Over the last year or two I’ve been trying out a different meditation coaching method, and have been quite delighted with the results.
Meditative dialogue is meditation coaching in real-time. I think this can be a radically faster and more effective method of meditation teaching than traditional models.
The process looks something like this:
- We identify something that you’d like to work with in meditation – for instance maybe you’d like to work with dullness, mind-wandering, stabilise metta, or there’s some persistent hindrance that won’t shift. (This doesn’t need to be perfectly clear – you might just be confused, or something doesn’t ‘feel right’.)
- On a call with me, you start meditating. I can lead the practice to whatever degree you feel would be helpful, and you describe what’s happening for you; whatever you’d like to share or would like guidance with, at whatever pace your experience unfolds.
- I ask questions, lead practices, and provide suggestions for how to work with your experience as it unfolds to meet your goals, with reflections/feedback from you. Together we can identify what’s holding you back, where your strengths are, and what works for you to develop your practice most effectively.
This is a very spacious and slow process that gives you lots of time to try out suggestions, ask questions or clarifications, and explore your experience.
Why Meditative Dialogue?
There are three strong advantages to meditative dialogue: 1. Holding Space, 2. Motivation, and 3. Clear and Immediate Feedback.
- Holding Space
I was greatly influenced by the Internal Family Systems process, after trying it for a little while by myself, and find that that doing the exact same thing with somebody else present to listen and hold space, was literally about 50 times more effective. Sometimes it can be astonishingly helpful to have somebody to hold a compassionate space for the difficulties, internal conflicts, doubts, and sticky emotions that inevitably arise during internal work.
2. Motivation
Meditating with another human, practising together with an attitude of play and exploration, tends to bring out the best of your potential. It often helps you to access meditative states that might otherwise feel out of reach. Once you’ve experienced these deeper states, it’s easier to find your way back to them alone, having had a taste of what’s possible.
3. Clear and Immediate Feedback
Let’s say you’re learning how to code. You have no formal training, and no instructions to follow, except for long, complex, and comprehensive code documentation. You begin trying to write a piece of code to do a task. You don’t know which part of the documentation is relevant to your purposes, and so you try to read and make sense of all of it. You often run into errors which don’t make much sense to you, and which take a long time to figure out.
This is not a very effective way of learning.
Much better is when you have a specific book or tutorial to follow which shows you how to use the relevant code to your task. This is the equivalent of a meditation manual. However, sometimes errors will still be hard to interpret; you’ll probably often be looking through your code thinking “what’s wrong with it?? Why isn’t it working“. You may need to scour the book looking for where you went wrong. Additionally, if your particular project needs something a little different from the book, this will be especially hard to figure out by yourself.
Better still is having a teacher. But imagine if you met with a coding teacher once every few weeks without actually having your computer present. You try to summarise exactly what you’ve been doing verbally, the teacher tries to give you feedback verbally, and you have to try to remember the whole conversation the next time you’re at your keyboard. The standard model of meditation teaching is a little like this; the feedback loops take place over weeks and months rather than seconds and minutes.
Now imagine that you have an experience and friendly coder sitting beside you at your computer. You can get detailed guidance and specific feedback whenever you make a mistake. You can ask questions, try new things out, and understand how things work.
You’re putting in the same amount of time and effort to learn coding, but the real-time feedback accelerates your progress rapidly and helps you avoid ingraining bad habits; your learning is faster, easier, and less uncertain.
If this sounds like something you think you could benefit from, book a call with me here:
Or find out more about me and my coaching.
