Dr Santorelli has been working in a decompression clinic for 20 years. He is the first intern in the clinic. The patients served by this project are more complicated, so the investment and skill level of the instructors are required to be higher. In the next interview, Dr. Santorelli will talk about how to choose a clinical tutor and how a person should become an excellent tutor.
Q: Tell me about the training of mindfulness decompression instructors.
Santorelli: Because meditation practice is the core of this work, our tutor needs to have an average of 16 years of meditation experience. Of course, this is not a rigid selection criterion. We also have some great tutors who haven't practiced for a long time. When choosing a tutor, we will comprehensively consider his life experience, academic background and meditation practice time. There are some tutors and interns in the clinic. They spend less time in meditation practice, but they have strong academic and "life" training. "Life" training can let you know something, something you can't know by other methods besides "life". In other words, if a person experiences a major disaster, this experience will provide him with a powerful learning opportunity. If he can benefit from this catastrophic experience, it will become the basis for his cooperation with others.
When an individual consciously faces the challenges and ups and downs in daily life, he can feel this conscious concern more effectively. This kind of attention will also be like an individual's promise to himself that he will remain aware of life no matter what he has experienced. Of course, that is to say, most of us don't have to face life all the time. This kind of attention and commitment to oneself may indeed be unattainable-I don't know. However, this kind of attention, this kind of commitment to oneself, although seemingly unlikely, can inspire some freedom and vitality. Since this is almost impossible, what will be lost if each of us tries? What will we find in this process? If we promise to make every part of life full of vitality, how will this change our view of ourselves, others and the world? Mentors are committed to answering these questions, which enables them to resonate with patients and form connections. This resonance stems from a deepening empathy and compassion, which is applicable to all situations in the world. Because everyone is no stranger to this universal empathy and compassion, when patients feel this indescribable connection between themselves and their tutors, they can feel a gentle connection with themselves. This gentle and accepting friendship with oneself is the foundation of meditation. Without this kind of friendship, you can't enter a state of peace and tranquility, and you can't see your life more clearly. Therefore, although long-term meditation is a very important consideration when choosing a mentor, long-term meditation can not completely guarantee that this person has the ability to face every moment of life, and people who lack this ability can not skillfully teach others to do mindfulness decompression.
The point is that meditation practice is not a single linear process, and it will not get deeper and deeper as you sit on the mat for longer and longer. Of course, this does not mean that a lot of strict formal exercises are unimportant. We just want to make sure that everyone realizes that (practice time) is not a hard rule. Some of our tutors have only five or six years of meditation experience, but their teaching is excellent. On the contrary, we met some job seekers who practiced meditation for more than 20 years, but at that time we didn't think they were capable of teaching. One of the foundations of this job is to know how to meditate; How to instruct people who are not interested in specific and inappropriate traditional meditation forms every day, and how to convey the core essence of meditation practice in a practical, common-sense and daily available way. Of course, we need to judge more clearly and accurately how long a tutor will practice, in order to master how to create an atmosphere that can help people understand the essence of meditation practice and apply these essences in a way that makes them feel at ease. If meditation practice, the instructor's skillful guiding skills and the patient's commitment are produced and linked at the same time, the instructor and the patient will have the opportunity to gain unprecedented internal strength for their growth and healing.
Q: So it really depends on the instructor's own qualifications?
San Thorelli: Not exactly. In fact, this is based on the relationship between the patient and the tutor. The tutor's skills will certainly have some influence, while the other part must be the intervention and attention of patients or project participants. My experience is that good teaching is often symbiotic and two-way. The two-way interaction between students and tutors and between patients and therapists is an important part of mindfulness decompression. We are very concerned about this. At the same time, we see again and again that a person must be an "excellent learner" if he wants to be a mentor of mindfulness and decompression. What we have seen before is that even if the new tutor has the "required qualities", it seems that it will take about five years to become a flexible, skilled and high-quality mindfulness decompression tutor. It is conceivable that the motivation of learning plays an important role in this growth process. In essence, to teach mindfulness to reduce stress, one needs to combine it with practice, rather than simply "teaching" practice. It is better to say that a person represents mindfulness than to "simulate" mindfulness to decompress. This is my life's work for me and everyone in the clinic. This feature makes this job interesting, full of novelty and vitality, not just a heavy task or career.
Q: Do you mean that even if a person has the required conditions, it still takes five years to become a good tutor?
San Thorelli: Yes. But this does not mean that our tutors have no potential from the beginning, but that they have some potential from the beginning. But it will take some time for these potentials to be realized. Here (University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center), you have to face all kinds of people and situations every day. If you are a tutor in some kind of meditation center, this may not be the case. We must admit that the hospital is the focus of suffering. People who feel good don't come to the hospital. People come to the hospital because they don't feel well, they want to seek treatment or help, or because they realize that they have a problem, their doctors advise them to come here for treatment.
On the one hand, patients have a very strong motivation, but on the other hand, it means that tutors will face great diversity. We teach independently, with about 25-30 students in each class. Courses are universal, but not homogeneous. Although patients have different symptoms and different situations, they have only one common purpose here, that is, to learn how to take care of themselves and how to live in harmony with themselves now. Of course, as mentors, we also have the same purpose. It is common to have five or six patients with different cancers or at different stages of cancer in a class. Some are still diagnosed, some are diagnosed, some are recovering, and some are being treated. We have patients with heart disease, headache, migraine or other chronic pain; Patients with immune diseases (such as lupus) and patients with hypertension, arthritis and gastrointestinal diseases; Others face situational pressure, such as the death of relatives, illness of relatives and friends, unemployment and loneliness caused by relocation. All these situations will strongly affect our lives, and then affect our health, health and happiness. People come here for different reasons. But most people have diseases, and their doctors will refer them here, so meditation can be used as a supplement to treatment. From this perspective, we are faced with a very interesting and diverse situation. In the face of patients with different situations, we can't just ask them to "continue practicing". First of all, we should switch between two States, one is to guide meditation and the other is to treat. Of course, there is only one state, that is, living in the present. The more teachers and patients can enter this state, the more they can open their hearts and care about how they can experience this state like breathing in mindfulness practice.
The transformation I am talking about is actually an action that transcends cultural and language restrictions. Most tutors will encounter cultural and language restrictions in their initial practice. Thirty years ago, most of us were taught by oriental teachers. Now, we should extract the essence of meditation practice and spread it in a way that will not dilute or weaken its essence. This is the core feature of our work. In addition, we strive to develop some accurate, acceptable and Americanized languages. We do this because we value what we have learned from these teachers; Because we try to understand what these exercises look like in our own lives and experiences; Because we are committed to making these exercises known in the culture of 2 1 century; But also because we can be seen everywhere. Those fast-paced and simplified cultures make people mistakenly think that the simplest and most "effective" method of teaching meditation will dilute it. But if it is diluted, it will abandon the beauty and profundity of practice and lose its essence, leaving only an empty and illusory form. This form can't really help people for a long time because it can't help people effectively at all.
So the first five years-I say this on the premise that he will continue to do this job after five years-are the growth period that all trained instructors will experience; Of course, there will be some signs on this road of learning. For example, we need to learn to help patients continue to participate in this course, especially when they don't get any relief in the early stage. Usually, in the early stage, patients will feel worse, because they begin to directly see and experience many physiological, emotional and psychological phenomena that exist in their lives but were previously ignored by them. Generally speaking, people begin to discover in their own pace and way that they unconsciously ignore themselves and their difficulties, perhaps out of fear or helplessness. They used to deal with these difficulties by keeping themselves busy, diverting their attention and doing other things. We can see these difficulties as long as we have the opportunity to stop being busy and enter peace. This is automatic and conscious. It wasn't the tutor who insisted that they watch it, but it happened on their own. In my book, I try to describe an 8-week course in detail and explain what happened to the patient and the tutor, that is, me, from an emotional point of view.
Q: What happened?
San Thorelli: Well, it's a relationship. Our work and this clinic attach great importance to interpersonal relationships. This is a process of cooperation and participation, because instructors often do what they ask patients to do (or even more). We will never ask patients to do anything we don't do ourselves, such as regular exercise and conscious breathing exercise every day. We're not just patients. Corrado Pensa, a meditation teacher, called it "sincere concern". We keep asking, exploring and checking. I don't think this is a process of excavation, but a process of revealing, dissolving and discovering what already exists in a gentle but inevitably painful way. This is by no means a painless process, but this process can enlighten us and let us know ourselves completely, so as to achieve the therapeutic effect. This will help us learn how to accept everything in life, not just some parts. From this point of view, it is a very interesting process to be a mindfulness decompression tutor. To some extent, I think we know a lot about mindfulness decompression, but to another extent, it is a huge mystery. Frankly speaking, I think this is a real mystery. Not because of our ignorance, but because we can never predict what will happen to others and how they will react to it. But don't forget that human beings are intelligent. Human beings have great potential, but most of them have not been discovered for various reasons. As an adult, we seldom get a learning environment that encourages you to really cooperate with yourself instead of consuming yourself. We rarely have the opportunity to cooperate with ourselves independently, let alone stay in a charming, cooperative and very dynamic community for two months. But in our course, in two months, we will meet patients 1 1 times. Meeting every week is equivalent to giving everyone a real opportunity to try some ways, see how they adapt, talk about mindfulness in class, tailor mindfulness exercises for their own lives, and then go back to life to do it. At the same time, the follow-up courses provide patients with a systematic way to expand and deepen the basic meditation exercises they have learned in the regular courses, so as to ensure that patients can still get a variety of methods to choose from according to their current or future life after the regular courses.
For example, some people find that yoga is an unprecedented effective way to relax and calm down. For them, yoga can calm them down more than sitting still. We teach patients various methods, which are all manifestations of mindfulness. Therefore, with the development of curriculum, people will gradually tend to those forms that meet their own needs. This is self-care, and this is what we think this course should look like. People have different learning styles-multiple intelligences-which will resonate in some way. You can say that this whole set of teaching is not only based on what we teach and how to teach-these are of course important-but in fact, we don't spend a lot of time and energy on education and study. "Who is the teacher?" This question often makes us underestimate the potential of self-reflection. I think the content of mindfulness is the core and accelerator of the course, and it doesn't matter who conveys this core content. In our training for tutors and other medical staff, we pay great attention to answering this question-"Who is the teacher?"
Q: How many tutors are there in your clinic?
San Thorelli: There are nine people now.
Q: Why not arrange more tutors in other places?
San Thorelli: We don't have any other clinics. These nine tutors include the staff of our inner city clinic, which provides programs for low-income inner city residents who speak Spanish and English. As I said before, there are about 240 places using this method. But they are not our clinic. Our relationship with them is not a franchise. In fact, Joan Cabat-Zinn and I have contacted most of them through our five-,seven-or nine-day training programs. Our other tutors will make more lasting contact with these people through a series of other teaching and development programs provided by Mindfulness Center, our internship programs, our teacher development training camp and multi-religious training programs. My colleagues Ferrisurbanowski, Elana Rosenbaum, Florence Meyer and MelissaBlacker have undertaken most of these projects, which are often carried out at the University of Massachusetts and other places in Europe and America. However, we have no personal relationship with everyone who has carried out mindfulness-based stress reduction projects in those places. Many of these people are long-term meditators and/or medical and health personnel. They have read our books and articles and think that mindfulness decompression is completely reasonable for them. So they started from their own state at that time. We have not granted any franchise to these institutions or personnel, and they are not clinics under our institution.
There is another reason. As the original mindfulness decompression clinic, we are a case in point. Mindfulness decompression was initiated by Joan Cabat-Zinn, and it was just an idea at first. Mindfulness practice has arisen for at least 2500 years and has evolved in many cultures. This has something to do with our mysterious tradition in the west. Buddhism explains mindfulness with a systematic methodology. It believes that through scientific methods, individuals can consciously cultivate certain abilities and skills, observe the results and form an understanding.
People who are interested in this kind of education have natural creativity. A few years ago, we decided to help these people turn on that kind of creativity, just like ourselves. At first, no one designed a course or blueprint for Jon and told him how to do it. It came out on its own, coming from his living conditions and strong desire to follow. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us are eager to find out what deeply affects us, and it is this desire that makes us engage in this work. No matter then or today, we are very eager to put what we love into action. The whole thing is so simple, clear and straightforward.
Some people in Europe and America are well-trained medical workers, and they don't want to separate mindfulness practice from other parts of their lives. We don't want to limit this creativity, on the contrary, we hope it can be opened in all kinds of unimaginable ways.
Q: Are you worried about quality control?
San Thorelli: People always say to me, "If you don't control it, the quality will decline. You have a gold standard, and you follow it. But if others use a pig iron standard, this will in turn affect you. " They may be right, but we can't control them.
We can control the teaching process, which is the direction we can continue to do. We will consider certification more seriously, but not in the usual sense. Not the certifier, but the certification of this training. We are confident that we can cultivate the correct teaching process. But we can't imagine that we can vouch for others. What they do is doomed, and their actions will speak for them.
Q: So, are you really considering some form of certification?
Sang Thorelli: Yes, Jon and I are paying more and more attention to this matter, not because we feel old, but because we are getting old, which needs to be passed down. For more than 20 years, we have been investing in mindfulness intervention in health care. Erik Ericson said that the feeling of reproduction-even if your own understanding is still growing, you should pass on what you understand to others-is very important to us. We are thinking about this problem more seriously, or more accurately, this instinctive human impulse is calling us louder, and we are beginning to do what it says.
Q: What might this inheritance look like?
I know what we have. We have several field training programs. We are reviewing these projects and redefining the whole thing. We ask ourselves, "If we had to start all over again today, what would be the development track of the whole tutor?" ? How can we participate in this process more thoroughly? What are we going to do, but what can't we do? I think it is important to ask these questions and explore possible answers. How to make better use of the resources around you? We have a two-hour teacher meeting every week. At the meeting, we talked about some business problems, but generally speaking, the purpose of the regular meeting is to ask you what happened in teaching. We keep asking ourselves and others, "What have we found?" "What difficulties do we have?" "What happened when I met a challenging patient today?" "What are the difficulties we feel when patients touch us, and how will we respond?" We won't pass it on to patients or some difficult diagnosis. We will ask ourselves, what problems are we facing as mentors? What is the connection here? How do we relate the isolation we find, and what does this connection have to do with our most basic exercises? In fact, how do individuals experience these moments with mindfulness? If a person is willing to venture into a field he has never set foot in, what will he find over time? This means that repeated attention will lead to discussion, affecting the whole team and every tutor in the clinic. We care about each other. Let's have a silent and vocal retreat together, focusing on those potential core issues. This is a simple way for us to try to be with each other. At the same time, we also try to explore the content of the course with the same attitude.
Q: So, you must also care about your own growth.
San Thorelli: Yes, but we must also consider more things. It is extremely important to consider more things. Mentors work together, just like in a melting pot. Here, not everyone unconsciously warms up for others. On the contrary, we reached a basic agreement-an intentional concern-that is, "yes, this is what I care about." If you can have 8 or 9 people with this kind of sober consciousness around you, it is very rare. These awareness will be formed in self-growth, mentor development, mindfulness center, our relationship with help seekers and our relationship with medical staff partners. So it can also be said that it is carefully designing how to achieve self-growth.
Mindfulness is not only observing, but also being observed. In practice, people will become more and more accustomed to these interdependent factors. It is very comfortable for a person to get rid of preconceived ideas about himself, me and who I am in front of peers. This is also a very powerful process. Most of us won't leave the clinic. We have been together for a long time. We feel that everyone is a real whole. Moreover, we are trying to gradually destroy our psychological intelligence in various ways, thus liberating us from the inertial behavior and thinking mode.
Q: Like a chorus?
San Thorelli: That's right
Q: Tell me about the internship program and how it developed.
Santorelli: I was the first intern in the clinic, and that was 198 1 year. Before that, this position was just a sentence, and no one did it. I'm very happy about that. About 10 years ago, we began to prepare a series of vocational education projects. One of my titles is the director of clinical and educational service department of Mindfulness Center. I study education. In fact, I have taught all grades, from preschool to graduate students. So I care and care about education.
Mindfulness decompression vocational practice project is one of the vocational education we provide. This is a 10 week project. During the first 8- 10 years, this internship program was free. After that, I started charging to ensure my financial ability. At present, about 1000 medical staff have completed this internship program. The charge for this project is $ 1800. Interns have the opportunity to attend two and a half hours of outpatient courses, where they can meet patients; Then immediately attend a two-and-a-half-hour seminar to discuss the links with other interns and their tutors. In other words, interns are participatory observers. As a result, they began to cultivate the skills inherent in meditation practice-to feel and integrate everything produced in consciousness and body, and at the same time learn to face the whole process of birth, aging, illness and death. Whether they have been practicing meditation for more than 20 or 30 years, whether they are physicians, psychologists, surgeons or social workers, interns need to do the same things as patients. Next, they have a two-and-a-half-hour seminar, which allows them to observe more closely what is happening in the class-what the tutor is doing and what will appear gradually. There are also some reading tasks that take a week to complete. Therefore, we try to create a kind of vocational education, which contains three classroom elements: knowledge, reflection and thinking. We must carefully design and implement these three elements in the teaching process, at least as we are designing mindfulness education. Interns do not teach patients. This is an opportunity for professionals to learn how to do it as close as possible without teaching. We don't teach them how to teach in the internship program. But in fact, it is to provide participants with first-hand experience about the methods, skills, theoretical parts and teaching orientation of mindfulness decompression. We receive 60-70 interns every year. Many people come from places within a five-hour drive, some from other distant places in China, and some from overseas. Interns who live in their own homes also have the opportunity to learn and participate in other aspects of the clinic project.