Teaching has changed enormously over the past fifty years. We’ve become more attentive to the experience of learners, more willing to offer choices, and more interested in teaching people how to deal with the difficulties they encounter while learning rather than simply telling them what to do.
I was reminded of this recently when I thought about how I was first taught to meditate. Meditation provides an unusually clear case study of how the process of teaching has changed—not because the technology for delivering instruction has changed, but because the instruction itself has changed.
Over the past fifty years, the process of teaching meditation has evolved from giving minimal instruction about what to attend to, to actively teaching people how to relate to everything that arises in their experience.
The striking simplicity of the old process
When I first learned to meditate, the instructions were remarkably simple.
Sit on a cushion on the floor, legs crossed, back straight.
Close your eyes.
Pay attention to your breath as it enters and leaves your body.
Then the teacher rang a bell, and we sat in silence.
Another bell told us when the meditation was over.
That was pretty much it.
Fifty years later, meditation instruction is more nuanced. Although we now have many more ways to deliver meditation instruction—online courses, recorded sessions, apps, and so on—that isn’t what I’ll focus on here. I’ll concentrate on how the process of teaching meditation itself has changed.
I’ve noticed three particularly significant changes.
The object of attention has expanded
Originally, in my experience, there was essentially a single instruction: attend to the breath.
Today, a teacher may offer a menu of possible objects of attention:
- breath
- sounds
- bodily sensations
- visual experience
- a body scan
- perhaps thoughts or emotions themselves
- sometimes an open field of awareness
And crucially, the teacher may say:
Choose one.
That’s a striking pedagogical change.
The old process implicitly said:
Here is what you should pay attention to.
The newer process says:
Here are several ways of paying attention. Choose one.
And it implies:
Feel free to experiment. Over time, you can discover which approaches work best for you.
That’s a move toward learner agency and individualization. The teacher still provides the framework and the expertise, but the student gets to participate in deciding how to practice within that framework.
That is a significant change in the teaching process. Instead of assuming that a single procedure is appropriate for everyone, the teacher offers a range of options and lets the learner discover what works.
The body has become part of the instructional choice
The old process prescribed not only what to attend to but also how to sit while doing it.
Today, meditation instruction commonly permits or explicitly teaches meditation while:
- sitting
- standing
- lying down
- walking
This is another movement away from a single prescribed procedure toward a repertoire of possible ways to practice.
The practice is increasingly being adapted to the learner rather than requiring the learner to adapt themselves to the practice.
This gives the student another dimension of choice. Someone who finds sitting uncomfortable can walk. Someone who needs to rest can lie down. And someone who finds closing their eyes unhelpful can keep them open.
And these aren’t merely accommodations for physical comfort. Different bodily configurations create different experiential conditions. Walking meditation introduces movement and proprioception; lying down changes the relationship to relaxation and sleepiness; keeping the eyes open changes the sensory field.
The teaching process has become richer, in part because teachers have recognized that the conditions under which learning takes place affect what can be learned.
Teaching what to do when attention wanders
Perhaps the most significant change is not what meditators are now asked to focus on or what position they adopt, but what they are taught to do when their attention inevitably wanders.
The old instruction was essentially:
Focus on the breath entering and leaving the body.
But what happens when your attention wanders?
Everyone who practiced meditation discovered that thoughts, sensations, emotions, memories, and sounds would interrupt their attention. But the instruction about how to respond to those interruptions was often minimal or absent.
Contemporary instruction makes this part of the process explicit:
Notice what has captured your attention. Allow it to be present without following it. Then gently return your attention to your chosen focus.
This is a much more sophisticated instruction than simply “return to the breath.” It teaches a sequence of skills:
- Recognize that attention has shifted.
- Become aware of what has captured it.
- Avoid becoming entangled with it or trying to push it away.
- Return attention deliberately and gently.
In other words, meditation teaching has evolved from focusing primarily on maintaining attention to teaching how to recover attention.
That is a significant change.
The teacher is no longer merely specifying the object of attention. The teacher is teaching the meditator how to work with the inevitable fact that attention will not stay where they put it.
The old instruction left much of this implicit. A beginning meditator had to discover, perhaps with considerable confusion, that their mind wandered and somehow figure out what to do about it.
The newer process anticipates the problem and provides an explicit procedure for handling it.
In pedagogical terms, this is an important evolution:
The teaching has shifted from specifying the task to teaching the learner how to respond to difficulties encountered while performing the task.
That is a useful distinction far beyond meditation. Much traditional teaching tells people what successful performance looks like. Better teaching also anticipates where learners are likely to struggle and provides them with tools to deal with those difficulties.
And in meditation, the difficulty isn’t an occasional problem with the exercise. It is the exercise! The moment you notice that your attention has wandered is itself an opportunity to practice the skill you’re trying to develop.
From instruction to experience
Taken together, these three changes represent something larger than an expansion of meditation techniques.
The teacher once largely specified the experience:
Sit this way. Close your eyes. Attend to your breath.
The contemporary teacher provides more choices:
Here are several things you could attend to. Here are several ways you could practice. See what works for you.
And the teacher increasingly provides guidance for navigating the experience:
Notice what happens. Don’t get caught up in it. Allow it to be there. Then return.
The result is a fundamentally different teaching process.
The learner is no longer simply following a procedure prescribed by an expert. They are being taught how to pay attention to their own experience, make choices within a framework, and respond skillfully to what they encounter.
That seems to me to reflect a broader evolution in teaching over the past fifty years.
Good teaching increasingly involves more than transmitting knowledge or prescribing a procedure. It involves designing an experience in which learners can discover things for themselves, offering appropriate choices, and helping them navigate the difficulties that inevitably arise.
Meditation makes this particularly easy to see because there is so little information to transmit. The basic instruction can be delivered in a few sentences. Most of the interesting teaching happens after those sentences have been delivered, when the learner actually tries to do what they’ve been told.
That makes meditation a useful case study for a much larger question:
How should we design the process of teaching anything?
We can start with what experts know. But perhaps we should pay at least as much attention to what learners actually experience as they try to learn.
Over the past fifty years, meditation teachers have gradually moved from telling people what to do to teaching them how to work with whatever happens as they practice.
That’s exactly the kind of refinement that occurs when a teaching discipline becomes more attentive to the experience of its learners.
And it raises a question.
What else could we improve if we approached teaching—whether meditation or anything else—as a process to be deliberately designed, observed, tested, and refined around the needs of each person learning it?
