The Skills of the Teacher

Abstract

In teaching mindfulness as a professional, the teacher works from her or his own unique authenticity, authority, and friendship. That means, of course, that all indi-vidual teachers are different, with singular ways of integrating and embodying mind-fulness. In fact, for this purpose, integrating and embodying are the same thing. Teachers know what they know, and can do what they do, based on the fruits of their practice and on the skills they have developed along the paths of their own profes-sional and personal development. As a result, the skills each teacher possesses may be a mélange of ideas, which is not so much integrated theoretically in the thinking, but, rather, more directly in the body of the teacher. Even at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts, the programs of teacher training comprise such a mélange. Pragmatic and eclectic, these trainings make use of a wide range of insights and practices from medicine, psychotherapy, education, anthropology–sociology, and world wisdom traditions. Again, the integration of all of this substance is not in theory but in the body of each teacher. Yet, at the same time, we also believe that there are general skills that teachers share; that is, we believe each teacher uses comparable skills to work with participants in her own inimitable way. We have discerned a scheme for parsing and elaborating the skills of teaching mindfulness as a professional that is helpful for us in our own development as teachers, in working with other new teachers and those aspiring to teach, and — most important — in continuously improving the experiences of the participants in our programs.