Practice/Study Groups

[Burning Dog of Irony (Ken McLeod)]

Let's open a discussion on practice-study groups. I regularly receive e-mails from people asking about opportunities to practice in their area. Often the requests come from people who are reading Wake Up to Your Life and would like to work with a group or a teacher on the meditations. Others are from people who would just like to practice with others who are finding their way, free from dogmatism or pressure to join one or other organization.

What is your experience with practice-study groups?
What are the pros and cons of teacher-led groups vs peer groups?
What have you found helpful?
How do you go about forming such a group?

There are many other questions to consider, but this is a start. I've attached a couple of files which have developed out of the experience of students here in Los Angeles with an on-going group that has met over the last three years. You can also look at what I've posted on the Unfettered Mind wiki by clicking here.

[Phil Vinson (Soldier of Vague Misanthropy)]

Ken,

I sit with a local teacherless group in Fort Worth, Texas, but it's for meditation only; no study. It started as a Zen group about 15 years ago, but the teacher stopped making the trip from Dallas because of traffic and other concerns. The group declared its independence from the "mother" center but continues sitting for an hour and a half each week. Most people there have practiced Zen, but anyone is welcome. One of the regulars gives a basic introduction to meditation when a new person arrives. On a good night, eight to ten people show up. We sit for 25 minutes per round, then do five minutes of walking meditation, then repeat that twice more. We end each session with chanting, usually the Heart Sutra, Four Vows, Verse of Purification, etc. A few minutes are taken at the end of each session for announcements. It would be nice to have a teacher, but everyone seems content to continue without one. I don't know how much spiritual growth is possible in this setting, but it's an opportunity to sit with a group, and is, I suppose, "better than nothing."

[Phil Vinson (Soldier of Vague Misanthropy)]

P.S. to the above. I find this group helpful for working on some of the meditations that Ken has suggested. Since there is no one method being espoused, everyone is free to meditate in his/her own way in the silence of the zendo.

[Laura Hirt]

If anyone would like to meet in Nashville, I have a conference room available for free. Please message me here at ning.com if you are interested.

[Leslie Ellestad]

I have been part of a peer led group for 7 years. I started the group under the direction of my teachers in a Dzogchen community. We had one teacher visit in those 7 years and 4 people in our group attended retreats(there was a long distance to travel). The group has been very helpful for my own practice in two ways. The sharing of practices on a regular basis helps keep me going and the reactions I had to people in the group over time revealed a lot to me about my conditioned patterns. There is something deeper that happens in relating to people with whom you practice than in more casual relationships, and I have made some major breakthroughs in "deconditioning" by working through my reactivity.

One difficulty with this set up has been the minimal access to teachers for many of the group members. Without a teacher it is not possible for students to progress in the way they may with a teacher. I have decided that to continue the group, I would like to have a relationship with a teacher who is able to come on a regular basis and provide teachings to the group. As my practice has deepened, I am more aware of both the pitfalls of practice and the benefits of access to a suitable teacher(s) who is(are) committed to the development of his or her students. Ken and I have talked about the possibility of one of his senior students come to our community quarterly and giving a weekend of teachings to our community. We will be exploring this idea in the upcoming months.

I would like to add that our group experimented with the guidelines that Ken and his Los Angeles students developed and found they helped deepen our discussion. I hope to expand my understanding of this approach when I attend the Mahamudra retreat this summer and experience Ken's Q&A style.

[Leslie Ellestad]

To be more complete, I should add that dharma book discussion was part of our practice for the first 6 years and many of the group members have said they got a lot out of this. Looking at what I have written, I sense that the evolution of our group is following a pattern that many students follow....meditating without much guidance, reading dharma books and then getting to a point where the search for a teacher begins.

[Ghost of Burning Mellowness (Randy Schroeder)]

I'm part of Leslie's evolving study and meditation group. I, too, find a good practice community to be indispensable: if practice is a rhythm, in that "showing up" regularly is key, then weekly meetings supplement daily practice and are, in turn, supplemented by retreats and meetings with teachers (and, for that matter, the whole range of e-resources now available). I find it too easy to get hung up on the effects of practice, and need continual reminders to just do it. So a concentric set of practice contexts has worked best for me, a mandala of reminders and adjustments, if you will.

Having said that, I also feel increasingly that a peer-group needs to be disciplined. It's nice to get together and jam, discuss, riff, unload, and exchange ideas. These interactions are all important, but I'm not sure any more that they are practice so much as supports to practice; I'm not clear on how different folks need different supports, on how to manage those differences, on how to schedule them. The most difficult difference, I've found, is that some members speak regularly with a teacher while others don't. That's not necessarily a problem--everyone's on the path--but it creates a somewhat disjunctive community with diverging purposes and experiences. I'd be very interested to hear from others on this issue.

[Pat Stacy]

I led a very small meditation-followed-by-discussion group for about 10 years. We met in my living room once a week. Two members always slept through the thirty-minute meditation. After the meditation I would ask if anyone had a question or topic he would like to discuss. Usually there were no takers. This was a very non-critical, safe environment, and still no one wanted to say anything. As leader I tried to keep the discussion on the experience of practice. What the two sleepers really wanted to talk about was gardening, plants, irrigation systems, etc.

We tried going through a book one chapter a week, but people would not attend regularly enough to follow along. They would say they wanted to study something, and then they wouldn’t show up for two or three weeks. Part of the problem was that I was very green as a teacher, and these people were not seriously interested in Buddhism. Deeply ingrained in my teaching is the premise that the teacher does not inspire or motivate the student; only provides experiential direction. Now I see that everything is Buddhism and I probably could have done something with the gardening stuff, but I’m offering this as an example of a teacher-led group that didn’t work.

When I say, “didn’t work” it has to be that it didn’t work from my perspective. Although people came for 10 years, no one seemed to have any deepening of understanding, nothing changed in the problems presented during the discussions, and the sleepers still slept. I confess that, as a teacher, I want to see movement. It can be minute, but I want to see the light bulb light up once in a while.

An example of a peer group that works is what I now have at the monastery I attend. Our teacher died almost three years ago and our Sunday mornings have morphed into a discussion group with the head monk leading but not dominating the talk. Everyone is free to ask or answer questions and does so in a way that helps everyone present.

There are two things that make this group work. One is the depth of practice in the room. Although we have people who are new (1 year), most of us have practiced for 20 to 30 years. And second, we have rules we restate from time to time. The rules are to enter and leave silently including the parking lot, and to remember this is an environment set aside for individual inquiry; so don’t interfere with anyone else’s opportunity while you’re here. I highly recommend this latter rule even though it goes against our natural tendency as social beings, is perceived by new people as cold, and has to be restated and explained every few months.

Ken has mentioned recently that people who are comfortable with having an authority in charge prefer a teacher-led group. We certainly had that for a long time, but we seem to have made the transition into a peer group very naturally and without disturbance. My conclusion is that anyone can benefit from either model if what he wants is Buddhism and not just to be comfortable.

As far as how to form such a group, I would want to examine that intention. Wouldn’t there have to be a need expressed in some fashion? Someone has to want support or teaching and ask for it, and that could provide the nucleus for a group. Ken has said he gets email from people who want to attend a group but can’t find one. Laura Hirt immediately and generously solves the problem for people in her area. It seems that all it takes is for one person to be willing to begin one. Couldn’t we use this forum to let people know what groups and teachers are available and where they are?

Cool Budgie of Pedagogy (Pat)

[Phil Vinson (Soldier of Vague Misanthropy)]

Another approach is an online group. Pat (Cool Budgie) and I have been involved with an e-mail group since about 1995, and we've become good friends there. The group started as an outgrowth of the Universal Zendo listserv, of which several of us rotated as moderators. We formed an offlist group to vent about the problems on the UZ List, and eventually it became our "own" list of sorts. There are about eight of us in the group, and it's very informal, but we do tackle some prickly practice issues, as well as chatting about all manner of things, from movies to music to politics. There is lots of wit and humor, but the one thing we have in common is Buddhist practice, and that never gets far from our attention. The group helped (tolerated?) me through six years of disillusionment with practice and resulted in my finding Ken eventuallly and resuming my practice with him.

[Art Gardner]

The link below is to an audio file that contains a discussion and demonstration by Ken on how small groups can be used to support the practice of each member. It explains how to use open-ended questions which direct people into their own experience.

Please note this recording was made prior to Ken's using microphones for the participants, so it is difficult to hear those in attendance when they speak.

http://www.unfetteredaudio.com/iap/IAP.mp3