There's this story I love where one of Carl Jung's students asks him if the apocalypse is inevitable.
And if you watch the news every day,
It definitely feels like it is.
But he said,
Not if enough people do their inner work.
And I love that answer.
And I think there are two ways to change the world.
One is from the outside in,
And the other is from the inside out.
And both are needed.
But I think if we don't change ourselves from the inside out first,
We tend to make a mess of the outside because of all of our pain and patterns and unconsciousness that bleed into our actions.
And so the job of a good meditation teacher is to teach people tools to shift and change from the inside out.
It's to help other people light that awareness,
To help them grow into who they're meant to be,
To find love and compassion,
Patience,
Resilience,
Clarity in themselves,
And then bring that energy out into the world.
And so I want to take a moment and go over the three steps that I see are necessary to becoming a meditation teacher.
And we can break this down into five or 10 or 20 steps.
I just want to go over broadly the three steps that I think are really important here.
And so the first step is having that awakening and stabilizing that awakening in yourself.
And what I mean by that is when we go deep into meditation and we have a shift of consciousness,
What happens is our awareness and our thoughts almost separate.
We realize that we are not just our thoughts or the images in our mind.
We're not just our past or what we think about it.
So we become the awareness.
It starts to expand and grow in us.
And then our thoughts stop having so much gravitational pull.
We do that by meditating.
That's one of the tools that we have in our tool belt.
All right.
So the first step is we have an awakening and deepen into that awakening of consciousness through meditation.
So that is step one to becoming a meditation teacher.
If you haven't done that,
If you haven't been through that yet,
Then it's important to find a teacher,
Courses,
Guides,
Retreats,
Whatever it is that you need,
Books to help you awaken that in yourself and stabilize that over time.
The second step to becoming a meditation teacher is actually learning how to teach,
Which is what I spend a lot of my time doing,
Which is actually teaching and now teaching teachers how to teach.
And that is an art form in and of itself.
And it takes time.
I used to be so afraid of public speaking.
I would just freeze up.
I would be terrified.
I would shake.
And it took hundreds and hundreds of times of being in front of audiences in different forums to get through that energy.
And then also learning how to craft what it is that you want to share.
So we have this awakening in us.
We find this light in ourselves.
And then we have to find an artful way to share it with the world and to help awaken others.
So that's a whole separate arc from just having that awakening in ourselves.
And then the third step is actually learning how to navigate the world as a teacher.
And in particular,
I mean,
The business world of it all,
The channels of traffic.
So are you going to be on YouTube?
Are you going to podcast?
Are you going to write books,
Teach groups in person or online,
Or do one-on-one counseling,
Coaching,
Guiding of some kind,
Take groups all over the world?
So how is it that you want to share the light inside of you to help awaken the light inside of others?
And then all of the specifics that go into that,
And generally the hard work and persistence that has to go into that over time to make it work.
So for me,
Those are the three broad steps of becoming a meditation teacher.
We have our own awakening of consciousness.
We learn how to teach and share that.
And then we learn how to navigate the kind of technical world that most meditation teachers just can't stand.
I just want to sit in my chair and have students just show up out of thin air,
Which of course we would all love.
But on a practical level,
We have to engage the world.
So I just wanted to share those three steps broadly.
Thank you for being here with me,
And I will see you in the next video.
