Safely Teaching Meditation & Mindfulness: Reducing the Risk of Harm to Students

Say you have benefited from a spiritual practice. Now you want to share this goodness with others — perhaps even make it your vocation, at least in part.

But, say you also want to avoid common errors that can undermine your good intentions. You want to steer clear of meditation malpractice, and reduce the chances that those you support will end up experiencing adverse effects, instead of (just) the good stuff.

If this is you, what can you do to help ensure that your actual impact reflects your best intentions?

I offer the following tips for teachers, drawing on my experience as an ordained spiritual leader, survivor of a meditation-based high control group, and as one who has been through the fire of bizarre suffering stemming from my meditation practice, and made my own way to stabilization and integration.
​

Image: Robert Lukeman / Unsplash

​Understand That You Are Treading on Sacred Ground

People explore contemplative practices for all sorts of reasons. Calming emotional turbulence. Following a vague spiritual longing. Seeking greater peace. Finding social support. Moving through grief. Improving focus. Gaining healthy detachment. Reaching for a connection to something greater. However well or poorly recognized, people turn to meditation to meet specific need(s).

Any person you work with as a teacher of spiritual practices may be vulnerable in some way. In addition to the specific goals they may have for their practice, they may carry childhood trauma with them, or more recent betrayals.

Into their experience of meditation — and their relationship with you — each person comes as a whole being, with their particular identities, their histories, their hurts, their hopes.

Image: Annie Spratt / Unsplash

​The medical model can provide some useful insights for meditation pedagogy. And secular frameworks may be right for some people or some settings.

Yet, mindfulness and meditation engage with the whole person: body, heart, mind and spirit. Such practices, sooner or later, may raise existential questions inside practitioners. About who they are. What life is. How to make sense of their experiences. What is the point of this human be-ing.

The trust people place in you as a guide is precious and fragile. How will you earn that trust? How will you remain worthy of it over the course of a teaching relationship?

A good place to start is by remembering that you tread on sacred ground. Take it seriously. Pledge to first, do no harm. Consider how you will stay clear on these First Things of teaching.

              “Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.”
                                          ~ Howard Thurman

Empower Others

If your commitment is first and foremost to the well-being of the people you teach, then your baseline aim with every student — regardless of what brings them to you — is to empower them. There can be no lasting growth without this.

Image: Jack B / Unsplash

​Empowering people is the opposite of creating dependence. Empowered students learn to know themselves, to trust themselves, and to do what is right for themselves.

How does an empowering teacher behave? Consider these DOs and DON’Ts.

DOs:
1. DO coach and model listening to the teacher within

2. DO use open-ended language and check your hunches with others (favor dialogue as a communication method, including when trouble-shooting)

3. DO invite students to listen to their own bodies, feelings, and reasoning, and to share their observations

4. DO believe this personal testimony — real experience trumps theory

5. DO encourage adaptation of practices to meet individual needs and circumstances

6. DO offer resources and options that the student can consider

7. DO welcome criticism with an open heart and mind

8. DO respect the needs and goals that drive participants’ interest — there is no one right or best reason to do the practice(s)

9. DO be mindful of group dynamics such as people-pleasing and social contagion

10. DO take a balanced approach to recognizing the potential benefits — and drawbacks — of the method(s) you teach

DON’Ts:
1. DON’T assume that one size fits all

2. DON’T withhold important information about the group or practice

3. DON’T mold them in your own image, or that of anyone else

4. DON’T “correct” students when they use their own words instead of group jargon

5. DON’T reward “good” students with your attention and punish “difficult” students by withdrawing your time or regard
​
6. DON’T make individuals’ belonging in the practice group contingent upon conforming to rigid expectations

Image: Artyom Kabajev / Unsplash

7. DON’T, under any circumstances, instill shame or use shame to generate compliance

8. DON’T discourage people from doing their own due diligence

9. DON’T reflexively just tell people to dig in and do the practice more — or assume they must be doing something wrong — when they encounter difficulties

10. DON’T treat meditation/mindfulness as a panacea

What would you add to your list of DOs and DON’Ts, based on your own experience as a practitioner and teacher?

Know Your Limits

No matter how long you have been teaching, you are a regular human. You do not have to be all-knowing; you do not have to be perfect; no one can be.

Learn about your own shadow side. There are many ways to do this.

If you journal, what shadow material comes up there? What insight have friends and family offered you about yourself? (If you haven’t asked, now’s your chance.) Working with a mental health professional is another way to zero in on your growing edges.

Image: sasint / Pixabay

​Do you know your enneagram type? This can be helpful for understanding your own motivations, insecurities and blind spots.

Do you know your Myers-Briggs type? It reflects cognitive functions favored by different people for processing information, making decisions, and connecting with people. What strengths and challenges are common for people with your preferences?

These are just some of the resources that may support you in knowing yourself and functioning at your best with others.

Hone your practice of self-differentiation. This means being firmly grounded in your own values and personhood, so that others’ anxious or insecure behavior will not influence you (as much). When you are differentiated, you are able to stay connected to other people without absorbing their thoughts and feelings — or needing them to share yours.

Relatedly, be aware that projection can occur with anyone, including students. And to the extent that others relate to you as an authority figure (even unconsciously), transference might pop up too. You don’t have to be and do everything people want from you. And you need not take responsibility for that which is not yours — in fact, you shouldn’t.

The upshot? You can’t control how other people behave, including how they interpret what you say or do. But you can improve your own self-understanding and your own functioning within the relationship. You can effectively stay connected to others, while remaining grounded in your own beliefs and values, and respecting other people’s.

Get Trained on Safety & Support

You should be familiar with adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness, ways to reduce the chances of them occurring, and how to respond supportively when you or your students do experience them.

Doing so will not undercut your effort to bring the benefits of meditation to others; on the contrary, it will help maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

Image: designermikele / Pixabay

Are you getting rigorous, unbiased information about these topics through the program or tradition with which you are associated? If not, you should take it upon yourself to find external resources. (You can also encourage your program to beef up their training for the future.)

This may all sound a bit abstract. So let me share one concrete, useful thing that researchers have come to understand: many of the same mechanisms that account for the benefits people receive also account for some of the problems that can occur. As it turns out, the inverted U-shaped curve that scientists encounter regularly applies to meditation and mindfulness programs as well.
Researcher Willoughby Britton puts it this way:

“everything has an optimal level beyond which you … start to get trade-offs or negative effects… That’s true of any physiological process or psychological process… so [mindfulness] is just like everything else” in that way. [i]

Some examples: [ii]

• Concentration practices improve executive functioning and downregulate emotions — helping bring you back from strong emotion to a steadier state. However, if you “overtrain your cortical limbic system” you may end up with neither negative emotions, nor positive ones. I recall one heartbreaking example I heard, of a parent who no longer felt love for their child as a result of this dynamic; they were just going through the motions of parenting.
• Contemplative practices can help one achieve equanimity, able to accept feelings as they are, or see thoughts as passing weather systems. This may feel better than getting hooked by thoughts or feelings that are unpleasant. But if you have “learned to systematically disregard emotions and thoughts” that provides “fertile ground for gaslighting.”
• Training your attention can be calming, as mental clutter falls away. However, if you overdo it, it can lead to panic. If you keep going, “eventually your system can only get so aroused before you either end up in the emergency room, because you haven’t gotten sleep for a week” or your body shuts down and you dissociate.
• Detachment from emotions can help you get a healthy distance. But pushed too far, the practice may lead to a person no longer feeling like they are in their body. They might feel like they are far away from everyone and everything, isolated and separate.

If you get sound training, and adapt your practices accordingly, you should be able to avoid making common mistakes that increase the risk of harm to students of meditation and mindfulness.

Cheetah House is a non-profit, science-based organization offering training on a variety of topics relating to safety and support. They also provide professional consultation to teachers and teaching organizations focused on meditation and mindfulness. There are lots of free resources on their web site too.
Know of other good resources? Please share details in the comments.

Embrace the Best of Professionalization

The role of teaching contemplative practices in medical, secular, or non-church contexts is a relatively new one in countries like the United States. Anyone can throw up a shingle (or a web site) and declare themselves a meditation teacher.

This contrasts sharply with more established fields of service. Longstanding religious traditions, at their best, provide significant infrastructure to support the effectiveness of religious communities and those that serve them. Similarly, governments regulate fields like law, medicine, counseling, education, and social work.

Image: sasint / Pixabay

​Wherever people are vulnerable and need to know if they can trust a provider to put their needs first, resources like these prove valuable:

• Training systems that equip people to take on a professional role — degree programs, apprenticeship models, credentialing processes
• Mentoring relationships and networks of peers
• Codes of Conduct and systems of accountability
• Continuing education, including training and support for professional ethics and healthy boundaries, as well as keeping up with new needs and evolving knowledge in the field

Look for these kinds of professional resources for meditation teachers, and make the most of them. If they don’t exist yet, support their creation. Everyone will be better off.

Make No Idols

Want to avoid inadvertently slipping into insularity, rigidness, and aggrandizement of a particular practice or person? If you abide by the DOs and DON’Ts above, that will take you a long way toward that goal.

Alas, it is all too human for a group or program to start out healthy, and slowly slide into cultish-ness over time. In a more decentralized arena like the mindfulness movement, this might seem less likely than in a religious context, or one with a clear leader and hierarchical structure.

But mindfulness groups are far from immune to cultic dynamics. As mindfulness practitioner and researcher Willoughby Britton observes, “often the systems are set up to not allow people to do whatever they want; there is a right goal, there’s a right way to do things, certainly no allowance for criticizing the system.” [iii]

Beware of treating meditation and mindfulness as the solution to every problem. Watch out for too-high goals like perfect peace or unending detachment. Don’t put anyone, or anything, on a pedestal.

Absolutely welcome the benefits that spiritual practices can offer, and celebrate when they happen. But never put practices above people and their real experiences and needs.

In sum:

• understand that you are treading on sacred ground
• empower others
• know your limits
• get trained on safety and support
• embrace professionalization
• make no idols

So long as what you are doing helps people to gain deeper trust in themselves — rather than making them dependent on a person, program, or ideology outside of them — you will be sharing the treasures of meditation with them in good faith.
​

Image: Bart LaRue / Unsplash

​For more about how groups behave when they become unhealthy, check out What Is A High Control Group?

Did I miss something important in this article? Please chime in to share your perspective or resource in the comments.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Endnotes

[i] From March 2022 interviews of Willoughby Britton on Rachel Bernstein’s IndoctriNation podcast. Part 1: Invisible Virtue Part 2: The Sugar Coated Panacea of Mindfulness.
[ii] Ibid. All references in this post are to those two podcast episodes.
[iii] Ibid.