Imposter Syndrome In Mindfulness Teaching And How To Work With It

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I have the honor of speaking with Lodro Rinsler. Lodro is a Buddhist meditation teacher and author and speaker, known for making meditation and these mindfulness exercises accessible to everyday life. He founded the Buddhist House at Wesleyan University. After college, he was recruited to be the executive director of Boston's largest meditation center. He's led workshops at college campuses throughout the United States. He's launched Buddhist immersion and teacher training programs similar to what we do. I highly recommend his trainings.

Speaker 1 · 1:13And a common theme that I hear from people is one of self-doubt as a guide, as a teacher. A sense of not being good enough to share these practices, not being perfect, not being enlightened enough, not practicing mindfulness perfectly 100% of the time. On the flip side, of course, we don't want to share these practices with others without having significant practice, without having walked our talk or covering the actual terrain ourselves. I'm curious how you might talk to people who want to help others be mindful, practice meditation, and they're plagued by imposter syndrome or self-doubt. How do you navigate that for people?

Speaker 2 · 2:09It's a really important question. And I only have my unique take. And if you ask a bunch of different meditation teachers, they will probably have their own. But from my perspective, I do think that there's this dance that we play. One part being who am I to be offering this life-changing practice to others? And frankly, when I lead meditation teacher trainings, I've been doing it for about a decade now. I always actually listen for that because I want those people who understand that this is such a powerful practice that they really want to cherish it and they're not going to be flippant about it. But I also want to build them up so that they understand that through their own practice, they have a lot to offer from their lived experience. Not because my program's so great, but because they're doing a lot of practice and they are learning more and more about it from their own perspective and are able to articulate that to others. That's what I think is really important. So it sounds almost a masochistic for me to be like, I look for the people that upped up. I look for people who value these teachings and are a little nervous because they value these teachings, as opposed to people who are a little glib about it, you know. Oh, who cares? It's not a big deal. Like you just say, oh, sit in this posture, follow the breath. I steer away from some of that particular energy when I'm talking to people and as individuals and whether they might join my teacher training program. And I keep this very small. I keep it like a dozen people at a time because for me, it's an experience I want to karmically take these people on and always be there for them. And I meet with them every month, both as a group and then they meet with me individually one-on-one. And I think it's just one of those things where for me, in order to feel good about it, that's like that's an important part that they go through an actual formal teacher training. They have a lot of time to experience teaching labs where they are practicing, refining their own authentic voice, not echoing me by any stretch of the imagination, but really finding how they can articulate their lived experience of practice and getting feedback from others, getting feedback from me and all of that. So that's just my particular way of doing it. But I don't think that other people's ways of doing it are bad. It's important that people do some program, some form of I am stretching in my understanding of this practice, learning from that, and then able to articulate from my own lived experience of the practice how I would talk about it in my own voice. But there's never going to be a time that we just stop doubting ourselves. I think if we did, then we'd already be enlightened. If we completely eliminated the trap of doubt, we would be enlightened already. We get to this point, whatever training program we go through, that we come at the other end, and there is a little bit of like, oh gosh, it's nice that these people believe in me, but who am I anyway? It's not going to go away. I am fond of a story. I interviewed recently, this comic book legend in my mind, Joe Kelly. Joe Kelly has written a bazillion comics. I think it's like 500 or something ridiculous, a very large number of comic books over time. And he currently writes Spider-Man, which is obviously this massive intellectual property that they handed to him and he sort of has one of the more important tools in the toolbox to play with. I asked him, so how do you deal with it? This little voice, do you still experience that? He goes, absolutely. Every month when this comic book hits the stance, I think, is anyone gonna want to read this? Are people gonna think I'm doing a horrible job with this important thing that they love? Are they gonna be mean to me on the internet? Like, what are they gonna do? So how do you deal with it? And he goes, Well, even though the voice continues to come up, I get to choose whether how much I listen to it. I'm paraphrasing that conversation because I don't remember the exact phrasing, but that was the message in my mind, the way I translate that is the doubt's going to come along for the ride, but I don't get to let it drive. I'm not going to do that. It doesn't get to drive. So whenever I release a new book to follow Joe Kelly's example, I go, oh, is anyone gonna care? Is anyone gonna read this? And then, you know, you sort of acknowledge that voice and you say, that's not the reality of my situation. For me, it's like if one person reads this and says this is helpful, it was worth all the effort. And that's happened. You know, here we are just really early on in its publication history, and it's happened a couple times already. So great, I did the job. It's done. Everything on top of this is gravy. So I do think that it's really easy for us, whatever ambitious thing that we're doing, we're going to doubt ourselves. Parenthood, my God. I have no idea what my kid's gonna hold against me at some point. It's gonna be something. There's no avoiding that, but I'm really trying hard. It's not like I'm gonna go hide from my kid because I don't want to mess this job of being a father up. It's quite the opposite. I sort of have to lean all the way in and set that trap of doubt aside long enough to be there 100% with her. Same thing with getting the writing done, same thing with teaching meditation. It's not that we're not going to have doubt. It's saying I can set aside that voice long enough to do the thing I want to do. I only adhere to one piece of writing advice personally. It comes from Raymond Chandler, the detective novelist, where he said that his process in writing was to throw up onto the typewriter every morning and to clean it up every afternoon. I loved that because it was the sense of like getting out of your own way long enough to get a bunch of stuff on the page. And then it's not like, oh, everything is brilliant that you write. You go back, you clean it up, that's fine. But that first step of getting out of our own way is really hard for a lot of people. I'm sure that there are people listening to this who are looking to launch that big business venture or looking to start teaching meditation or looking to do something else. The voice has to be set aside just a little bit so that we actually go out and do the thing that's we know is going to be helpful and impactful. That's also, again, to keep reiterating the point we come back to, that's how meditation helps. It helps us put down that voice just a little bit.

Speaker 1 · 7:20Thank you. Yeah, I agree with everything you just shared, and I think it's really helpful for our listeners to hear when you talk about this trap of doubt.

Speaker 1 · 7:30Makes me remember the teachings of some of my teachers on Hiri and Otapa. Are you familiar with Hiri and Otapa? I don't believe I am. Okay. Wasn't sure if it was a Tibetan

Speaker 1 · 7:45thing or a Theravada thing, but they're translated as the protectors of the world. I think in certain Japanese, I think, monasteries and maybe certain Chinese chump monasteries. There's protectors at Buddhist monasteries with swords and grimacing faces, these warriors. And one is named Hiri, H-I-R-I, and the other is named Otapa, O-T-T-A-P-P-A. Very Buddhist D characters. But Hiri is translated as a sense of shame. Yeah, like moral shame, right, yeah. And then Otapa is often translated as a fear of wrongdoing. So one is like a sense of shame for what's already been done. The other is a fear of doing wrong in the future. And when I first learned about this, it felt confusing because oh, well, aren't we supposed to say not have this sense of shame or fear? And it felt paradoxical, and I wasn't quite sure how to hold that. And Rajan uh Passano and Amro and other say Theravadan masters will talk about them in glowing terms, that these are protectors of the world, that we need a healthy sense of quote unquote shame, or a healthy sense of fear of wrongdoing. And so I'm just wondering if you happen to have a way of holding that alongside these teachings on the trap of doubt, and how we can have a healthy sense of shame and fear of wrongdoing without it paralyzing us, getting in the way, or creating a sense of heaviness in our mind.

Speaker 2 · 9:41Thank you for that question. I appreciate it. I do write a fair amount on shame, guilt, mistakes, all of these sorts of things in this book, which is a lot of my own learning and a lot of the teachings that I am very fortunate to receive. And there's one particular quote from Pema Children I always think about, which is the sense that negative shame is accompanied by guilt and self-denigration. She says, it is pointless and it doesn't help us even slightly. But she talks about positive shame, which is really interesting, which is when we have recognized we're either harming ourselves or anyone else and we feel sorry that we have done so. And that allows us to grow wiser from our mistakes. She says, eventually it dawns on us that we can regret causing harm without becoming weighed down by negative shame. Just seeing the hurt and heartbreak clearly motivates us to move on. By acknowledging what we did cleanly and compassionately, we go forward. So when we talk about shame and guilt, I myself have found it really helpful to face these feelings directly. And the phrase that I offer in the book that's helped me is to just say, I too am human. And it reminds me that I'm this fallible learning human being is that acknowledgement that we can learn and grow from our mistakes, that we can move further toward wakefulness, doing less harm to ourselves and others over time. So I too am human. Twelve, 14 years ago, I was serving on the Board of an Aid organization for unhoused youth. And I led this meditation for a group of teenagers. And this participant came up to me after and he said that his grandmother had given him a phrase that he'd never forgotten, that he shared with me, that I'm gonna share with you all. He said, 100 different mistakes are progressive. 100 of the same mistake is regressive. I love that. 100 different mistakes are progressive. 100 of the same mistake is regressive. Meaning we make a mistake, we learn from it, letting it change us for the better. That's progress on the path of becoming more fully human on waking up. That growth puts us in touch with our basic goodness. If we repeat a mistake without learning, it's regressive and we'll keep getting stuck in our same pain. And I think that distinction is really important.

Speaker 1 · 11:40Beautiful. I just watched a video of Kobe Bryant basically saying the same thing about how he approaches basketball and how he never fails if he learns from his past mistakes. Very different context. But I love that.

Speaker 2 · 11:53Same idea. It is across the board because if we linger in the past, beating ourselves up over and over again about this thing and not learning from it, that just keeps us locked in pain. We're not actually even available to help those in front of us in different ways. But if we can learn, if we can change, if we can grow. I think that's an interesting thing in today's world because it's very easy for us to solidify. No, this is who this person is, and they're bad and they're wrong, as opposed to what we're talking about in basic goodness, is like everyone's basically good. And sometimes they act out of confusion. I have, you have, this is how people operate. So it's having some awareness about that.

Speaker 1 · 12:25Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 12:26Personally, I just got back from Peru, was hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and I was hiking with some friends, but also some people I had never met who happened to be from the United States. And I got into a conversation with this one older lady who was asking me about the presence of evil in this world. And she said, What do I do with these judgments I have of the evil in this world? I gave a very off-the-cuff response in which I said, Well, I don't know for a fact that there is such a thing as quote-unquote evil. Personally, I think that there's love and goodness in the world that's embedded in the fabric of our universe. And my sense is that the things that we may deem as being evil may in fact just be unwholesome actions or energy derived from a root of, say, confusion or fear or what the Buddha might call like delusion. And she wasn't convinced of that. Quite frankly, neither was I. I don't pretend to know whether evil exists in the world, but that was kind of my hunch. And she said, Well, on an individual level, I can see how people like Hitler were confused, they were deluded. I may be able to find compassion for them. But from a larger energetic level, from a larger collective level, it seems like there is such a thing as evil. And I don't know how to deal with that. So I'm just curious if you have any take on this and how you might advise us to relate to this potential of evil in the world.

Speaker 2 · 14:30I don't think evil is a thing. People might just turn this off right now upon hearing that. Hear me out though. Verene Brown has this phrase that she has used, which is it's hard to hate people up close. And I think when we say, oh, that is evil, it's not actually someone we know. It's not our neighbor is evil. Our neighbor, we could say, oh, you know, they're loud or they're mean or whatever. But we don't give up on their humanity. They seem very human. We see them walk their dog and care for their dog. You say, oh, they love their dog. I love my dog. I understand that. So it's I don't think we we're walking around saying our neighbor is evil. It's people we read about in the news. It's people that we never meet. And then because we've heard stories and probably only negative stories, and this is what I was getting to earlier in terms of our divisiveness, when you asked why did I write this book? It's that sense of like we're just increasingly in our bubbles and then alienating each other. Anyone who's not in our bubble, we say, Oh, those people on that side of the aisle are crazy, dumb, wrong, stupid, whatever. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is just wrong or bad. I don't think society is going to move in a lot of good ways if we hold tightly to that notion and say, well, that person's evil. That party is evil, whatever it might be. I think what you said is actually really brilliant. It's those people are pretty confused. They're pretty distant from what we would call our basic goodness. People don't often create harm and do what we might consider evil things because they feel great and everything's going their way. They do it because they feel threatened in some way where they don't feel good about themselves. So this age-old question, and there's a whole chapter about what about that world-threatening politician? Everyone, the moment you talk about basic goodness, everyone goes, Well, what about that person? And not trigger anyone, but the question that I received for a bazillion years now is what about Hitler? Clearly that person, and that was the gold standard. And then around 2015, people began to ask, what about Trump? And by 2022, what about Putin? And it seems in the past decade or so, we're more readily open to there's going to be certain individuals who are irredeemable, devoid of basic goodness. For the record, if you love Trump, for example, you might say this about Biden. It's just that more often than not, these are the questions I got. So I'm reiterating it as I received it. And the short answer is really hard because it is this sense of, like, yes, even Hitler. Like, and I need to pause before going on to a longer answer. Clearly, Hitler did atrocious things. Crimes against humanity. Not saying he's a good person or someone worth admiring. I'm saying the opposite. He's someone who's so distanced from his basic goodness that he was able to convince himself to do horrible things and that those horrible things were right when clearly they were not. That's what we're talking about. But at the same time, I don't think Hitler emerged from the womb hating all of these people. He learned that type of thinking over time, and that hate distanced him from any semblance of basic goodness. And then the consequences are catastrophic. I'm of Jewish descent. I have branches of my family tree clipped as a result of this. So it's hard, I think, to ask people to contemplate that evil being. Again, often it is someone that they don't know, an authoritarian ruler, a politician, and say, what if they possess basic goodness? It's a difficult topic for me. I get that. But as I mentioned earlier, like our neighbor, they have people they love or dogs they love who love them back and they experience moments of genuine open-heartedness. There's this old quote from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogan Trunk Rampoche, where he said, everybody loves something, even if it's just tortillas. Which, by the way, my daughter loves tortillas. I get it. They're delicious. But this is like this fundamental truth. Like everyone has the ability to soften and connect to the world around them, even if it's just in a very small way. So I think that is evident that everyone, absolutely everyone, possesses basic goodness. Everyone is capable of love and compassion, and that there aren't exceptions to this rule. There aren't just people who are off that map of and they're evil. I just think that they're very distanced from how they are connected to their basic goodness.

Speaker 1 · 18:12I love this metaphor or this truth that someone like Hitler was so distanced from their own humanity that it's hard to hate people up close. And it just echoes this encouragement that you're sharing to meditate and to become closer, more intimate with our own humanity, and that the closer we become to ourselves, largely via meditation and mindfulness, we uncover that goodness, that love, that beauty of ourselves and our humanity, and that the more distance we are from our own humanity, easier it is to forget our own beauty and to arrive at these doubts and self-judgments, and then project those outwards. So this is an invitation for everyone listening to befriend ourselves, to sit and rediscover ourselves through meditation and mindfulness.