Prior to beginning this module and to the daylong session:

Prompt 1: What are one or two habits that arise when you feel vulnerable, not confident, maybe even powerless in your teaching role? How do those habits influence your ability to connect with students?

Prompt 2: Meditation teaching is not regulated. Who would you feel comfortable in your current role to be responsible to? Answerable and accountable? (Not just yourself. Could be one person, a therapist, a group of people, peers, in the sangha or outside…)

Article to review: Fourth Mark of Existence

Article to read: On the Importance of Understanding and Being Understood

Goals:

1. Holding the impact experienced in sanghas, from a lack of clarity or policies to ethical transgressions, and the effect on us individually.

2. Exploring power dynamics and our teaching role. 

3. Teachings: Conditionality and the Marks of Existence; how they are inter-dependent within the conditions of our lives and our ethical vulnerabilities.

Materials Relevant to this Module:

Schedule

Power: a User’s Guide Review

Circles of Conditionality: Challenges & Vulnerabilities

Circles of Conditionality: Friends & Supports

Sample Challenges

Sample Friends

Fourth Marks of Existence

Additional Resources:

Article: Losing Yourself – How to be a person without a self

Complementary Translations: Four Ennobling Truths / Tasks

Post:

Gather and bring to Module 3: Your ethical guidelines: agreements, codes of conduct, grievance policy… Either print them out or be able to access them on a device.

Strongly suggested:
[Use the materials below as an anchor for a dharma conversation. If you want to fly solo, take time for your own reflection upon each of these topics.]

Prompt 1: Power plays out differently in the roles and positions that we hold. We may be able to see something more about our relationship to power by looking at the other roles we have as a parent, partner, eldest child, professional… Choose a role and consider the kind of power you hold in that role.

Prompt 2: We all have tendencies to put what we don’t like about ourselves on to other people. This can also happen inadvertently when we are teaching. Describe a situation that has happened for you recently, or in the past with students, peers, or other teachers.

Handout/ chart: Violations of Spiritual Trust
How would you explain this chart to someone who is going through an ethical crisis or dilemma in their sangha?

Article: Hierarchy is not the Problem
Choose a section of the article that you disagree with or feel did not quite sit right with you. Start your reflective conversation there.