Co-worker going to Spirit Rock tomorrow

www.spiritrock.org/calendar/display.asp?id=MC5D10

Above is a description of the day long event she will be attending. Look at it very carefully.
As you must know by now, I am fascinated by what is taught at this and other really popular Buddhist oriented vipassana or "insight" meditation centers.
Anything I say is not meant to be mean or as some kind of harsh judgement. I don't really know why it is so interesting to me.
Anyway, read the description carefully. What I think it does is it shows an example of the "working on your stuff" school of modern western vipassana. Right? This day, which sounds pretty cool actually, is meant to help people become better people, right?
It's not a course on "awakening" the way a lot of us see it, it is a course using a lot of what the teacher (an accomplished teacher and therapist) has adapted from his practice to .... well, help people become better people.
I think my friend here at work will get a lot out it and I can't wait to hear how it goes.

" www.spiritrock.org/calendar/display.asp?id=MC5D10

Above is a description of the day long event she will be attending. Look at it very carefully.
As you must know by now, I am fascinated by what is taught at this and other really popular Buddhist oriented vipassana or "insight" meditation centers.
Anything I say is not meant to be mean or as some kind of harsh judgement. I don't really know why it is so interesting to me.
Anyway, read the description carefully. What I think it does is it shows an example of the "working on your stuff" school of modern western vipassana. Right? This day, which sounds pretty cool actually, is meant to help people become better people, right?
It's not a course on "awakening" the way a lot of us see it, it is a course using a lot of what the teacher (an accomplished teacher and therapist) has adapted from his practice to .... well, help people become better people.
I think my friend here at work will get a lot out it and I can't wait to hear how it goes. "

Oh, and I told her that I did vipassana and she seemed genuinely shocked.
She said "every day?" and I said "at least that."
I don't know if she was shocked to find an actual person who did this stuff regularly or shocked that Mike Monson did this stuff regularly, you know? of course, I think it was more of the later. I really doubt I'd fit anyone's model.

Thanks, Mike. I too find this interesting. Here is the promo copy from the ling you posted:

-- Have you noticed the negative disabling effects of self-judgment?
--- Are you prone to judging everything you do as not good enough, not quite right, not living up to some impossibly high standard?
--- Do you find yourself harshly judging your meditation, your practice or your other spiritual practices?

If you would you like to learn how to be more free from the torment of the inner critic then this day retreat is for you.

On this retreat you will learn :
--- How to recognize judging thoughts
--- The role and function of the inner critic--its purpose and limitations
--- How to deal effectively with self-judgment / and inner critic attacks
--- How to distinguish between negative judgment and wise discernment and discrimination
--- The role of a healthy conscience versus reliance on the inner critic
--- How to develop greater self-acceptance and self-compassion
--- The practice of metta - loving kindness--as an antidote to the critic
--- The need and role of humor in helping us with the critic

The day will be a combination of meditation, talks, and interactive exercises and is open to new and experienced students. Teachings are appropriate for both individuals and health care professionals. This will be a practical and experiential day taught with lightness, compassion and humor and the need to not take ourselves too seriously.

My comment: This teacher is not pretending to teach awakening; this is straight-up psychology. I am not surprised though. How else to get butts in the seats? I lead a class every Tuesday in Jersey. A few people drive or ride the bus up from NYC. It's a huge ordeal for them to get there. Ian Reclus comes every time, bless him. But nobody comes from the local community; what I do is not interesting to them. Pragmatic dharma is a hard sell!

For context and contrast, here is the promo for the weekly class I've been offering:

In this weekly class, Kenneth Folk offers hands-on techniques for awakening, self-realization, and enlightenment. These classes are for people who are willing to consider true peace of mind as a natural and attainable aspect of human potential and who are willing to try a results-oriented approach to finding it. Discarding ideas and doctrine in favor of practicality, Kenneth's approach is clear, unsentimental, and eclectic, drawing from Theravada Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Dzogchen, and Zen. Weekly classes will include dharma talks and instruction, periods of silent meditation, and ample opportunities for questions and answers. No prior meditation experience required. Come to any or all sessions.

- people go to these things thinking they are getting dharma and they are not. isn't that kind of a lie or am I being too nit picky?
- I think spirit rock also teaches awakening for real, right? where is that on the website? shouldn't there maybe be some kind of clear delineation between therapy retreats and real vipassana retreats?
- could it be that the spirit rock people like jack K are really okay with this approach and don't even think that the dharma really needs to be about real awakening to our true nature? that it is just about making our self better at being selfs?

I mean, come on, the greatest thing about real insight is that one can see how silly self improvement projects are and thus being able to side step that whole process entirely

I was listening to a series of Kornfield Lectures that clarified some of this for me. He says when he first started teaching he was all fired up to get people to enlightenment. That was his aim in teaching. As the years went on he saw that very very few people were succeding. Most likely due to not following instructions because Kornfield is very familiar with the mahasi method. Eventually as he began to get older he realized that teaching therapy with some buddhist coating was working, in the sense that he found peoples lives were improving. So that is in a nutshell what happened....

So it was okay for him to be enlightened but for everyone else it was fine to just improve their lives?
why is that so weird?

I think you might be being to hard on him Mike. First of all its hard to judge someone I haven't meet. It also seems like, if you spend years trying to teach people how to make 5 star french food to people and 99.5 % of them have a negative/fearfull/apathetic reaction. "Oh no I can't do that I don't care what you say. I'm not up to challenge, can't you just show me how to make a pot roast, it will be a lot easier." Eventually you will get sick of it. Also, being supported by students complicates things. If he is trying to make a living he would need to cater to his students to a certain extent. He obviously is awakened and considering he is a teacher of Vince, I can only imagine he is willing to get into the nitty gritty with people who are interested.

I dunno I hope you don't take this personally Mike... I recently spent some time on a very conservative forum and I caught the chauvinism pretty good. With that perspective I guess I see us doing the same thing a lot of the time. We are better because we get it done etc. Well ok, yeah we make real progress along the stages of insight... but not everyone needs that. Some people are content to just adopt a new identity and work on thier issues. More power to em. I mean I need real awakening, but I had the insight disease in a BAD way. Live and let live...

Clayton, I'm trying really hard not to sound mean or hard.
But if something seems weird, it's okay to express that, right? I'm open to an explanation or to just let it go, really.
It's not chauvinism so much as confusion, I swear.
I mean I really don't care what they do, but I am concerned that there are people who really havce the insight disease and don't realize there are actually places to get some cure.
I think a lot of people have the disease and think if they go to spirit rock they will get a cure and I think most people will get therapy and never realize there is more. way more. and I'm not just making that up. it actually makes me want to tear up and not in a nice way.

No man I know exactly what you mean. It really baffles the hell out of me. I don't understand it. I guess I just want to think the best of the leaders in that community. I have been exactly where you are (and will probably go there again), to the point of wanting to cry because people just are not taking the steps they should to overcome their spiritual malady. I guess I just am in a phase (they come and go) where I am tired of holding that particular pain for someone else...

Edited to add: I still will try to help someone I know if they are showing obvious signs of Insight Disease. People don't seem to believe me, or think it can happen for them... I guess I forgot the fact that you are speaking of a friend. Not some nameless hypothetical... I was projecting my own stuff onto your thread, nevermind...

"No man I know exactly what you mean. It really baffles the hell out of me. I don't understand it. I guess I just want to think the best of the leaders in that community. I have been exactly where you are (and will probably go there again), to the point of wanting to cry because people just are not taking the steps they should to overcome their spiritual malady. I guess I just am in a phase (they come and go) where I am tired of holding that particular pain for someone else...

Edited to add: I still will try to help someone I know if they are showing obvious signs of Insight Disease. People don't seem to believe me, or think it can happen for them... I guess I forgot the fact that you are speaking of a friend. Not some nameless hypothetical... I was projecting my own stuff onto your thread, nevermind... "

Clayton, it's okay I love you.

I love you too...

oh and it is clear that my coworker suffers horribly in her life.
but, the truth is, i don't know if she has insight disease. the therapy approach could be EXACTLY what she needs.
it's really people like me and you going to "insight meditation (therapy) centers" and zen centers and actually ready and wanting to awaken and getting nothing really. I mean I always knew something wasn't right but I didn't know what to do about it until hearing daniel.
believe me, no one at those places looks out into the crowd and sees the person that needs real awakening instruction and takes them aside and makes sure they get it.
they are into the program at their center that is laden with budgets and grants and donations and all that.
That is great that they exist and they can employ all those people and they can provide some buddhist-oriented therapy but can't there be truth in advertising? let Kenneth Folk honestly say what he is offering and get what he gets and let the rest truthfully say they are offering a hybrid of buddhism and therapy as a way to improve people's relative lives.

one last thing!
Clayton must be right that some people at those places are getting the real nitty gritty and if you love spirit rock and krnfield please don't flame me.
unless you really feel you have to

I would say that the problem of mushroom culture is much more complex than simply mushroom culture teachers. Even when people are around no-holds barred straight to the point teachers (like Adyashanti, for example) they don't wake up. Or really commit themselves, more to the pint.

And I'm not judging here. It takes an enormous amount of awareness plus beneficial conditions--which might be depression or loss--to even be able to see the problem that enlightenment is aiming to solve. I'm not trying to be pessimistic here; I'm just saying that even getting someone to the door is hard.

I used to take (drag, coax) people with me to see my teacher back in my missionary phase. People had A&P kinds of experiences, and they got value from them. But by and large they didn't come back or go out and seek other paths either. The experiences were meaningful, but that was it.

So this, I think, is where we get into questions of stage of development and what people are ready for. Where Wilber comes into a degree (or karma, if you are traditionalist). A guy like JK is teaching, IMO, to the stage where most are--they are still testing out the limits of the relative self. Hell, I still am too in some way. I just recognize on some level you ultimately can't win at that game.

Hey Mike,

I feel at least some of your confusion and your pain. It hurts me that there are not more places where someone can go and find down to earth, practical information on the path and on how to walk it. It hurts me because I think I am someone who could use that kind of information and because I have friends who could use it as well. I was lucky enough to stumble across MCTB and be open to Daniel's ideas but many of my friends are not as open to that.

Luckily, things are not quite as bad as you may think. You can look at Spirit Rock and maybe the West Coast Dharma culture in general as an onion. There are many layers and while some of them might be hard to get to, they are still there. You can see some of the layers here on SR's Programs page: www.spiritrock.org/display.asp?pageid=841&catid=2 There are several programs designed for yogis with different levels of experience and interest starting from the very casual and going into the very dedicated. While they offer Day Longs that seem kinda fluffy at first glance, they also offer a 2 month long residential retreat. And I guarantee you that the level and focus of the teachings at those is very different. No, they probably don't teach Kenneth's 3 Gear Transmission but if you want to talk maps of insight or jhanas or detailed technique you will find teachers with decades of experience who are willing to discuss that with you. I've found most of the teachers I've met in the community to be open and inviting and supportive, not to mention that many of them obviously have a depth of practice that is absolutely inspiring.

If you look at the surface level, you'll see the image they project to most people which is friendly and inviting. If you look underneath that you'll find much more depth and opportunities to practice.

Eran.

I've been thinking about this a lot as part of looking for a local teacher over the past few years.

(And I will say as a caveat, that I'm going to re-think all of this when I finally get stream entry.)

The first thing is the previous generation of teachers pretty much all did long retreats or were monks/nuns and devoted a huge chunk of their lives to achive what some people have been able to do off retreat or with minimal retreat. Many come from the line of teaching that you have to master jhana before the center point can be seen through. As a result, they don't have any real hope that anything short of that works consistently. And I believe that they are acting compassionately -- in their perception -- by not creating expectations that cannot be achieved. I'm sure they have seen folks waking up quickly, but it isn't dependable to them. So they save those kinds of teachings for the month, two month, and three month retreats. Shorter retreats are warm-ups, but not where the real work gets done. I went to a ten day IMS kornfield retreat and people were largely not going for it and the dharma talks were not about meditation per se. Several dharma talks were actually comedy routines. I actually picked up on the feeling -- this is totally my interpretation -- that 10 days were just long enough for volitile stuff to happen, so let's keep it cool.

So finding a teacher that believes it's possible for lay people to awake is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It may hard to tell, but i still think Spirit Rock is a great place. They do things with integrity and care and I think their hearts are in the right place.
okay

The second thing is, I do think people -- myself included -- probably would benefit from the treatment modalities of social workers and psychologist etc. Of course, that's what many of the retreat leaders do as an occupation, so they're super sensitive to it. I just think it would be better if these kinds of teachings/methods were just labeled as such. Why not call it what it is and >>really<< go for that modality? Go to a depression treatment retreat, or a borderline-personality disorder retreat. Hit is straight on. And why not have meditators be honest about needing a few tune-ups and head shriking when it's called for. I think it's culturally easier for the demographic of fairly successful folks that go on buddhist retreats to recieve psychology treatment in buddhist clothing than it is to just go in for counciling. Yeah, myself included.

The conclusion of all this thinking is I finally decided to work with Kenneth, although I would much prefer working in person rather than via Skype. And during rough patches I still wonder, would it be better if I also got my head shrunk a little by a pro? That's the truth.

Adding on to Mike's commment...

And it needs to be said that IMS really is good for the soul in a lot of ways. I would return for another retreat in a heartbeat given the time and money. I've been on other retreats that were, sadly, more cultish and not nearly as grounded. It was wonderful to go on a retreat with basically sane and caring teachers.

www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/115/

The first two podcasts here are the talks he gave Saturday. I haven't listened yet but their is a voice inside me saying I better listen so or else I suck.

Hey Beta,

It is a complicated issue but you seem to be approaching it with a pretty clear head. My advice would be to keep working with Kenneth/being a member of this forum. If you think you might need to see someone else though you might wanna check that out. I haven't been in counseling for wow like 9 months, but I do check in regularly with a 12 step program. Point being, it really helps to have other tools to use to work on our shadow stuff... insight is not a cure all, but hey you probably knew that right : )

I've made it 12 minutes into the first one, I don't think I can go on much longer.
This talk is NOT about disembeding.

Steve Armstrong pointed out the problem with the term "insight" as opposed to vipassana. In English, insight often is used to refer to greater understanding about the workings of the relative personality. So it's natural for people to become confused.
But I think the psychology thing is predominant for several reasons. On the one hand, you have people who are still exploring the potentialities of the relative self and believe they really need this kind of work, which in some cases might be true. On the other, you have the chronic yogis who are stumped as to why they aren't progressing. They have tasted progress, and now feel stuck in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of situation.
They ask, "Why am I not progressing?" And the conclusion they come to--seeing how imperfect their relative selves actually are--is that they are too attached, too lazy, too fearful, too greedy, etc. They haven't made enough progress on the self-perfection end of things and so they can't make any progress toward realization. Sometimes this is stated quite explicitly. It seems to be a big reason for the popularity of integral theory as well: People assume they need to perfect the body, the psyche and the view before they can fully realize what the integral people call Spirit. So they're lifting weights, doing energy practices, devouring Wilber books.
Most people have never been told that all they have to do is follow the instructions and put in the effort and the time. (They haven't been given the actual instructions, either.)
Of course, if you truly are too lazy, attached and fearful to follow the instructions for real--if you're embedded all the time despite your periodic attempts to free yourself--you won't progress. There is something to these kinds of workshops. A person who beats himself up and says "I can't do it because I'm terrible" won't progress. (Yeah, that's me.)

I like your analysis, Joel. I would add that in many cases learning more about psychology or integral theory does not help the chronic yogi; it only adds to the paralysis. The yogi becomes on expert on spirituality and forms all sorts of non-negotiable ideas that directly impede his or her progress along the line of developmental that leads to enlightenment. This is a variation on the theme of the devoted Buddhist who cannot/will not follow the simple instructions because he or she "knows" that those of us who claim various degrees of enlightenment are heretics. Such people often think of themselves as "traditionalists," forgetting that according to the Pali suttas the Buddha and most of the people around him attained and boldly claimed arahatship, raising the question of exactly what tradition these modern "traditionalists" believe they are following.