Mindfulness teachers: how are you reaching people?

[Gillian Sanger]

For all the mindfulness and meditation teachers here, I am curious: how are you reaching people during these times? Are you still teaching in-person or are you using apps, online courses, or video conferencing?

If you have any tips for how to share our work online (such as specific apps, course building websites, etc.) I'd love to learn more.

[David Weiskopf]

My small group meets on Zoom due to the pandemic here in Utah. We only meet once each week for an hour. Zoom has worked well for us.

[Jeff Miller]

I started teaching online in 1996 on AOL. When the WWW appeared I taught in forums. When Facebook appeared, I started teaching there. I have an email list that I teach through. I use Skype. Sometime next year I’ll start using www.learnworlds.com. I’ve never taught face to face and don’t plan to. I currently have around 300 active students.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Jeff Miller

[Rachel]

I was just invited to lead a short mindful meditation for female identifying people during an event of a women's collaborative in the city where I live.  It will be taking place on Zoom as well.

 

[Gillian Sanger]

That's wonderful news @Rachel! Keep us posted on how it goes. 

[Rachel]

Tonight is the event...I am excited and nervous!

[Gillian Sanger]

On 2/4/2021 at 2:27 PM, Rachel said:

Tonight is the event...I am excited and nervous!

How did it go Rachel!?

[Rachel]

It went really well and I am excited about the opportunities arising from it! 

I am going to be partnering with a body positive/inclusive yoga teacher on a workshop of welcome where we will make space for every body and all of that body's experiences with a combination of restorative yoga and trauma sensitive mindfulness meditation.

Two other participants have reached out to learn more, one around my work with children and the other for herself and her colleagues.  

Super exciting for my passion for sharing mindfulness to be generating some enthusiasm!

Thanks for the support and checking in!

Rachel

[Gillian Sanger]

That sounds wonderful Rachel! I am not surprised it was a success and has led to more opportunities. Continue to share your upcoming plans with us

[Amy 🌸]

On 2/8/2021 at 2:00 PM, Rachel said:

It went really well and I am excited about the opportunities arising from it! 

I am going to be partnering with a body positive/inclusive yoga teacher on a workshop of welcome where we will make space for every body and all of that body's experiences with a combination of restorative yoga and trauma sensitive mindfulness meditation.

Two other participants have reached out to learn more, one around my work with children and the other for herself and her colleagues.  

Super exciting for my passion for sharing mindfulness to be generating some enthusiasm!

Thanks for the support and checking in!

Rachel

Hi Rachel,

That sounds promising! Btw, do you have some tips to share about how to add trauma sensitivity to mindfulness meditation? I have a few students who expressed childhood trauma and we’re starting Body Scans...

thanks,

Amy

[Rachel]

Hi @Amy -

I am excited about the opportunities popping up for sure.

I am definitely not an expert in teaching mindfulness quite yet, but a resource that helped me understand trauma sensitive practice (and build on my understanding of trauma sensitive practices training during my many years as an urban educator) was David Treleaven's book, Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness.  He outlines some principles which make sense to me for all teaching, really.

For teachers, he shares the 4 R's:

-realizing the pervasive impact of trauma

-recognizing symptoms or signs in students

-responding to students skillfully

-preventing re-traumatizing

The big tenets I have applied to my teachings thus far, beyond those 4 r's are:

-fostering practices to help students stay in their window of tolerance (this might be worth researching as related to body scans)

-shifting students' attention to support stability in practice

-keeping the (physical) body in mind (again, useful to look up for body scan practices)

-practicing in relationship with others

-understanding social context/systems that cause trauma

Hope this is helpful!  Best to you!

Rachel

[Amy 🌸]

Rachel, thank you sooo much for reminding me about  David Treleaven‘s work. I watched some videos by him last year and couldn’t remember his name! I will check his work out further. Best wishes to you on your teaching! 

[Kimber]

Hello all, 

What a great question GIllian, thanks!

I guide live meditation online at Mind Oasis, Fridays at 1pm EST.  It's completely free, and easy to access at https://mindoasis.org/community-meditation/. They have several guides providing live meditation each day. 

I also record meditations and those can be accessed on the popular app, AURA Health.

I don't have a personal website, but you can check out my personal profile on AURA Health at: https://www.aurahealth.io/coaches/kimber

And - if you are interested, you can check out AURA Health for free for 30 days.  They have recorded meditations, life coaching, bedtime stories for adults and children, and bible stories and prayers.  Here's the link:

• https://web.aurahealth.io/guestpass/kimber

Hope you find it helpful!

Best,

Kimber

[Jeff Miller]

I pretty regularly pick up new students from my FB page and have several FB groups that I selectively place them in depending on their experience, degree of interest and receptivity which I determine by way of a pre-acceptance interview and essay. 

A couple of days ago I posted two brief sentences on a dark blue background with white text. It was shared 360 times as of today and the engagement topped out at 1,432 likes / loves / hugs. It resulted in two new long haul students. 
 

 

[Jeff Miller]

A few more thoughts about how I use FB to attract and engage with potential students.

- - -

You can view my FB profile page here:

https://www.facebook.com/jeffmiller432

... to get a sense of how I use this channel to attract ‘followers’ and friends (potential students). It can be regarded as a fishing net that lures people in with what they are interested in and then captures / engages them.

The page content is used to cultivate a remembering of what we are, where we are, how what we are / where we are operate, and what has happened in the past, along with an awareness of / attention to what is happening now and what is inevitably going to happen.

Once they are in and sufficiently entertained / engaged, I then subvert their dominant paradigm, sneak the essence of mindfulness (not the container of the essence) into their field of awareness, undermine their conditioned patterns of thought, de-energize habitual emotional reactivity / grasping / craving and collapse hallucinatory misperceived divisions between ‘internal’ / ‘external’ and ‘above’ /   ‘below’ (which are one space).

At the point that they ask for deeper engagement, or I think they are ripe enough, I float the idea of them applying for access to one of three diff private FB groups to explore the post topics more experientially (at a level that matches their cognitive ability and degree of commitment).

You may notice that direct reference to ‘mindfulness’ (and related jargon) aren't generally used. This is because it really isn’t positively regarded in Western culture outside of a small, bourgie (and those who aspire to it) and mostly white cultural subgroup. 

... and also because I prefer not to be associated with it as it has been presented in Western culture (McMindfulness  ... “Its All About You!”)

... or with how Western culture has been conditioned to mythify, mystify, personalize, neuroticize and fictionalize traditional sati / remembering - which was mistranslated as ‘attention’ by a few white privileged Western men in the 20th century, who, with typical Western hubris and arrogance, imagined they understood sati / mindfulness better than it was understood / taught in premodern / ancient cultures for thousands of years.  This resulted in a consumer commodity that appeals to the above described insular cultural subgroup who imagine that their view of the interface between personal existence and the whole of existence is superior, more accurate, more authentic and more effective, even though it is nearly always a self-concretizing, self-reifying, preferred degeneration.

My targeted demographic is people who aren’t captured and conditioned by received notions of ‘spirituality’, who aren’t enchanted and dragged around by their emotions, who reject consumer culture, who understand that this rickety civilization is perched on the edge of a crumbling cliff, that recognize that the natural world they exist innately embedded in and utterly dependent on for sustenance and survival is fast unraveling, and that sense / understand that the human animal is now deep in existential crisis and threatened by near-term extinction.

Working in this personal page environment let’s me even more selectively target those participants who I suspect are high probability potential students by posting content that specifically but covertly addresses issues they reveal in their responses and by their posts on their page and on other pages.

I also post content that reflects the  physiological / neurological / societal effects of each season in real time as they are occurring and participants are experiencing them, whether they are conscious of experiencing them or not.

Personalized  targeted content increases engagement and conversion rate. 

Also note the use of relevant eye-catching images that communicate the essence of posts non-conceptually.

Online learning environments aren’t even remotely similar to meatspace environments and require very different style and UX (user experience) considerations. The mind functions very diff in an online space. This actuality needs to be consciously factored into online teaching strategies if there is to be a meaningful and effective engagement. 

In sum, modern people really don’t want to wake up. If we are to be authentic mindfulness teachers then we need to meet people where they are and skillfully lure them out of their burning house and back to Earth (of which the body/mind is an inseparable dependent element of).

https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_burning_house

[ If you visit my FB page, hit the “friend” button! ]