Teaching Meditation in the Modern Age

As the world evolves, the way we practice and teach meditation evolves with it.

— Are you enlightened?¹

I didn’t quite know what questions to expect in meditation interviews, but I should have seen this one coming. When my teacher Vince Fakhoury Horn invited me to assist him at a 10-day meditation retreat, I said yes before asking about any details. A few months later, I was doing nine interviews a day with retreat participants.

Who am I to teach?

I’ve been practicing meditation for over a decade, but I have never taught it to others. Even after Vince and Emily Horn invited me to join a two-year meditation teacher training, I was in two minds. On the one hand, I love meditation; it changed my life. On the other hand, who am I to teach it, really?

I remember discussing it with my coach Krish Surroy. He shrugged and said: “You don’t have to have a Nobel prize in chemistry to teach chemistry. There’s nothing grand about chemistry teachers.”

Okay, that will do, I thought, and joined the teacher training.

Our meditation hall at the retreat.

Three perspectives on teaching

Teaching meditation is an interesting endeavour. We can approach it from three different perspectives: moral, technical and modern.

Moral

Let’s start with the moral perspective. The modern mindfulness movement extracted meditation out of traditional Buddhist teachings, but the rest of the path that the Buddha and his countless followers traditionally taught included² training in morality, which, simply put, is all about how to be a decent human being who doesn’t harm themselves or others.

This is important for two reasons. One reason is that without a firm foundation in ethics, there is a danger of spiritual bypassing. That is, using meditative techniques and the lessons we learn from meditation to bypass addressing practical problems on a very human level. This is, in short, how some meditation teachers occasionally end up at the center of sexual or financial scandals.³

The other reason ethics are important is that we can’t get very far in concentration training unless our own life is more or less in order. As Jack Kornfield said, “It's hard to meditate when you have spent a whole day killing and stealing.”

So, one part of having a calm and stable mind is simply being a decent human being. It’s a two-way street. A calm mind helps us be less selfish or greedy, and being less selfish and greedy helps us have a calm mind. Having few needs and being happy with little also does wonders to how calm and peaceful our minds can be.

The Buddha said, when asked who is it who fares well upon the path, is it the fortunate, is it the intelligent, who is it that fares well, that finds peace and happiness easily? He said, “it is those whose needs are few and who are easy to serve.”

The Joy of Service, by Burgs

We also become better human beings and create suitable conditions for meditative progress when we work on healing our psychological traumas and integrate the unloved parts of ourselves into our conscious self. Much of this work is done in therapy.

Looking back over my decade of learning to meditate, I wish I had invested far more time and effort into therapy, healing and sorting out my life in a very mundane way. It was true that the stress of being a startup CEO prompted me to meditate in the first place, but not really knowing how to handle the stress and fall asleep every night with a calm mind was also a major obstacle to my meditative progress⁴.

A common mistake, and one of which I’m guilty, is to assume that sitting and meditating alone is sufficient for psychological healing. We get hurt in relationships when others harm or neglect us, especially early in our development. To heal this, we need to do this work in the context of secure relationships with those we trust to always accept us as we are, reminding us that we are unconditionally human.

This, by the way, is why AI isn’t a replacement for humans as therapists, coaches or meditation teachers⁵: anyone who thinks deep relational work can be done by imagining a relationship with a machine doesn’t understand the nature of this work or even what makes us human in the age of AI.

Anyway, it turns out watching my breath is hard when my mind is full of anxiety. Who would have thought!

Sunrise at the retreat centre.

Technical

Meditation instructions can be both deceptively simple and incredibly complex. The gist of training in concentration is paying attention to a chosen object, such as breath, on purpose, returning to it every time the mind inevitably wonders. Yet, there is far more depth and sophistication to it, once our attention gets sufficiently stable and we start working on deeper concentration states⁶.

Many retreat participants were familiar with Daniel Ingram’s book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (MCTB), which is about 700 pages of small print explaining how to sit still and do nothing, but also what to expect on the way: while everyone’s journey is unique, the patterns of experience are quite predictable.

Yet, knowing what to expect can be a hindrance. During an evening Q&A, one student asked about the most common mistakes that keep coming up in daily meditation interviews. I said, there were two. One was that most students were too hard on themselves, trying to force themselves to concentrate better. The other was that they had too many ideas of what should be happening during meditation instead of just noticing their experience as is.

“Take a box of tissues,” said Vince when I asked him for advice before starting my daily interviews with retreat participants. He was right. Quite predictably, the high peaks of meditative insights with their sense of bliss and open heart were followed by a period of disillusionment characterised by various feelings commonly described as “bad”. So the box of tissues came handy.

My fears of being out of my depth discussing finer aspects of different maps of insight proved unfounded. Not because I know them all — I don’t — but because the most common thing I found myself saying was, “This too shall pass. What is happening is not a mistake. Let it be.”

The only reason I could say those words and know I’m not lying is that I’ve been there.

Modern

Even though the Buddha taught over 2,500 years ago, Buddhism remains surprisingly relevant to the modern age. This is due to two factors. One is that the core project of Buddhism is elimination of suffering and the world is still full of it. The other is the incredible flexibility of teachings, adapting to different contexts, societies and epochs without losing their essence.

What the Buddha taught in northern India back then is, essentially, what Zen masters started to teach in China and Japan a few centuries later and what modern Western teachers are doing today in the West.

This also means that we must adapt the teachings to the modern context, taking what works and changing what doesn’t. Indeed, this what has been happening in the history of Buddhism: it has been constantly and incessantly evolving over the centuries.

One adaptation that we need to make today is learning to practice meditation in the world full of digital distractions. Not only has the Buddha not seen a single push notification (lucky him), but practically all popular books on meditation have been written before iPhone was invented and we started to feel the impact of digital distractions, 24/7 email and slack access, and constant news coverage, reminding us daily that the world is falling apart⁷.

So at the retreat, in a Dharma talk, I spoke not about finer points of concentration training, but about what’s been a real challenge for me: my relationship with technology.

Each of us is wired differently. I know people who struggle mightily with substance or alcohol addiction. Yet, I personally never had such challenges. There are others who don’t see any appeal in social media and don’t feel any urge to pick up their phone first thing in the morning. I’m not one of them.

My iPhone’s home screen today. No icons make me consider what app I want to search for. Black-and-white makes the phone less appealing to use. Absolutely all notifications disabled.

Yet, being constantly distracted by technology is, in a way, training in anti-concentration. If we’re improving our concentration skills every time we return attention to the breath, we’re degrading them every time we get distracted by our digital devices.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that a healthy relationship with our digital devices should now form part of meditative training given how widespread the problem is. I will give a Dharma talk on this topic at the Buddhist Geeks network next Friday, 7th February. Feel free to join.

Yet another way in which Buddhism is adapting to modern times is Multiplayer Meditation.

A lake by the retreat centre.

Multiplayer meditation

Multiplayer Meditation is a fancy way to describe a practice of meditating aloud and together. At first, it makes no sense. Isn’t meditation all about sitting alone with your eyes closed? As it turns out, meditating together works surprisingly well.

This technique was pioneered by Vince’s teacher Kenneth Folk and further enhanced by Vince. At the retreat, we combined both traditional silent meditation with multiplayer meditation, which was particularly powerful for loving-kindness practices.

This shouldn’t be a surprise given that feelings of love, compassion and joy are inherently social and yet traditional practices to cultivate them are done in solitude. My guess is that for most of human history, we lived in close communities, so we developed contemplative practices to complement that lifestyle.

Today, loneliness and isolation are a global problem. Too many people have plenty of colleagues and acquaintances but no real, close friends they can confide in. As ever, Buddhism adapts by pioneering practices that bring us together, counteracting our individualistic lifestyle.

Another way meditation adapts to modern times is that multiplayer meditation can be done not only in person but also on zoom. It may seem crazy that being on zoom with other people can be just as powerful in terms of accessing deep states of concentration as sitting alone on the cushion, but it works. I was skeptical myself until I tried it. Now I facilitate it.

If you’re curious about trying multiplayer meditation yourself, check out the community at Interbe.ing, also founded by Vince.

Completion, I mean, Conclusion

As much as I hate my inbox addition, the reason my smartphone feels so alluring is that sometimes it brings genuinely good news, like an invitation from Vince to help him lead this retreat. It was a wonderful opportunity to practice, deepen by own understanding of meditation and connect with many wonderful people walking the same path.

May you be happy.

May you be free of suffering.

May you know true peace.

1. No, and neither is Joshu’s dog.

2. As some teacher said, I can’t find a quote, there’s a reason it’s an eightfold path, not a threefold or fivefold one.

3. See an interesting discussion Why Gurus Misbehave.

4. A counterargument, of course, is that I the very reason I have learned this lesson is by making this mistake in the first place. I suspect I would have ignored someone who’d suggest I do more therapy and less meditation a decade ago.

5. Except, maybe, in one respect. To create an interview schedule for Vince and I and about 25 retreat participants with all kinds of constraints (“I’d like to talk to this student, no more than one interview a day, but at least one every other day etc.”), I asked Google’s Gemini AI to do it for me. It did an excellent job, saving me a lot of time fiddling with excel and manually checking it all.

6. Also known as jhanas. If you’d like to practice them, check out Vince’s Jhana.community.

7. Remembering the scale of the challenges the world is facing is helpful. Feeling a constant rollercoaster of anger, fear and sadness as the result of reading the news coverage all the time is not. Vince and Emily will lead a retreat focused on Dharma and apocalypse later this year.