Meditation and Learning
An Instructional Design for Mindfulness
Introduction
Dr. David Merrill is a legend in the field of Instructional Design, the outside view of learning you might call it. It’s all we had until fMRI and other measuring instruments came along to, supposedly, tell us something about learning from the inside.
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn is a legend in the field of meditation, an inside approach to training the mind we have had for centuries. Kabat-Zinn and others adapted Theravada Buddhist techniques and introduced them in more accessible ways as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or Insight (Vipassana) Meditation.
Merrill’s own experience and his distillation of cognitive science research begins with the idea that learning is a multi-step process, not a singular event. Others have described slightly different versions of the Events of Instruction, but the number of steps are not as important as the insight that learning may appear chaotic on the surface, but has crucial underlying components and probably a preferred sequence.
To Merrill, and many others, that preferred sequence of components supports learning best when it has a problem focus.
To Theravada Buddhists, there is one problem. Suffering, and how to reduce or even overcome it. That’s the First Noble Truth, the suffering problem.
The Second Noble Truth is that suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they are. The Third and Fourth Truths kind of run together and say you can stop wanting things to be different than they are and nip suffering in the bud — all you have to do is follow the Noble Eight Fold Path.
Easier said than done. I mean, Right Livelihood? How about any livelihood at a time when old models of work are dissolving before our eyes? Right Speech? Like I’m going to take that one on at a time when policing speech has become central to maintaining social order. Nah.
I’m cutting the line. My instincts tell me to jump to the top and put Right Mindfulness at the center of Merrill’s learning model. At least it’s one way into the problem of suffering — but, even Mindfulness is contested space.
Who gets to say what Mindfulness is so it can be taught? Are deep roots in a Theravada lineage required? What if I increased my ROI 32% by meditating mindfully every day, would you buy my book? Even the term, Right Mindfulness, suggests that there is a Wrong Mindfulness.
Like many explorers, I Googled it. Your search might not be my search but for me the Mayo Clinic’s definition came up first. Not Theravada, but a reputable health care organization.
Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpretation or judgment. Practicing mindfulness involves breathing methods, guided imagery, and other practices to relax the body and mind and help reduce stress.
Mayo Clinic
What do you see there? I see hard work — intensity, focus. Things that are difficult to do and especially difficult to sustain. It will supposedly de-stress me, but it’s kind of stressful thinking about all that intense focus and what I need to accomplish.
Have I been doing it wrong all these years? What about meditating on the sound of one hand clapping? What about Zen Koans that are not relaxing the more you think about them meditatively and they’re not supposed to be.
Who gets to say? Not me. The words that try to say what Right Mindfulness is aren’t Right Mindfulness. But the words of a Mindfulness Meditation should help people experience the meaning of Right Mindfulness in themselves.
Merrill’s First Principles apply to learning at every scale and every form — as a ‘webinar,’ as a ‘course,’ as a ‘life-long learning project.’ And as a single meditation.
When I was fifty I entered a Ph.D. program about Learning that featured Dr. Merrill. It meant moving from the western suburbs of Boston to Cache Valley in northern Utah, home of Utah State University.
It was a total cultural change, which appealed to me and felt like the way to go into some big new program. That concept scales too. You don’t have to move, but I think it helps to mark off a new mind space for any kind of learning project.
Call it the Header, not quite the thing yet, the transition, the interval. The Bardo.
Box Breathing is one of many many many-squared breathing techniques available to the modern meditator. I like it because, for me, it is right in the middle of Vygotsky’s, Zone of Proximal Development, not too hard and not too easy, so I am gently but fully engaged.
We start together, all exhaling wherever we are individually in our breathing cycle and begin a few Box cycles together. Breathing in,2,3,4. Hold,2,3,4. Breathing Out,2,3,4. Hold,2,3,4. Repeat, 2,3,4. People get the idea quickly and usually need to be in silence to find their own rhythm.
Two minutes of Box Breathing is a nice interval, a nice Header in the context of single meditation.
Activation
Activation implies gaining attention and more, something I do not claim to understand algorithmically, only intuitively, although some cognitive scientists might make a more empirical claim for some learning projects. To me, it’s like the warm-up act before any main event. Starting to simulate the activity. Bringing existing associations to the foreground.
I tell people about a series of eight questions I will say out loud that won’t be judged with right or wrong answers but are meant to touch what is already linked to mindfulness for you.
1. What is Meditation? First, what verbs come to mind. Then what adjectives. Any nouns? Adverbs?
I ask people to keep their attention lightly on the question and the flow of thoughts it stimulates. When they notice attention drifting, just bring it back to the question.
2. What isn’t Meditation? Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say a great idea comes up when you’re meditating on your breathing — the potential answer to an important problem you’ve been working on. Do you get engaged in this thought, or go back to the breathing? What isn’t Meditation?
3. Do you have an Intention when you Meditate? If so, what is it?
4. If you had more optionally-investable time, do you think you would Meditate more, less or the same amount?
5. I tried meditating for the first time in April, 1972 at a Zen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I quit after a few tries because it was too hard.
Do you find Meditation hard?
6. I began a regular practice in October, 1974 after being taught how to meditate by the Transcendental Meditation organization, which also told us if we meditated as we had been taught for twenty minutes twice a day — within 30 years we would attain Ultra Consciousness. I was 25 and now I am 72. I don’t use the TM technique any more and I don’t believe I have attained Ultra Consciousness, or if I have, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be. I don’t know if this is still part of the TM organization’s teaching but in 1974 it was.
Do you have a long-term goal from meditation?
7. Is Mindfulness primarily about Ourselves in the present moment, what we are thinking, sensing, feeling? Can you be Mindful beyond the yourself?
8. Is Mindfulness a type of Meditation?
Please take a three deep breaths. That was our Warm-Up.
Demonstration
Showing is usually better than telling, but telling is usually easier.
What wise teachers tell about Right Mindfulness is that it means de-activating your auto-responders, except they probably wouldn’t say it that way.
I say it that way because I try to show Mindfulness by talking about it as clearly as possible but in ways people aren’t used to and have no auto-responder in place for. I try to help a little mindfulness happen by talking a little funny about things that matter.
It all goes back to the Suffering Problem that is everywhere in every second we are not fully accepting of now. Maybe telling this little story of Monastic people wanting shows it.
It was at Hsi Lai University (UWest), owned by Buddhists, outside of LA, where I helped a faculty of Buddhists teaching mostly about Buddhism with instructional technology. I became friends with Monks and Nuns who had taken vows to not-want. They never asked for anything, only took what was given freely.
I was the one who most needed to break through my conditioning about not-wanting and not-asking. It took a while. Finally, I was speaking with a young monk one afternoon in my office. He noticed a book on the shelves and said, “Oh, I see you are a reader of Teilhard de Chardin.” That was borderline from his perspective but it was obvious enough that I got it.
“Yes,” I said, “he’s influenced me greatly and I’ve read the book cover to cover three times. It would mean a lot to me to give it to you,” reaching for it and handing it to him as I spoke.
The monk was not beyond wanting. He wanted to borrow the book, but he was beyond asking. Sort of. I have no idea what my supposedly mindful intervention meant for his path. Maybe it helped. Maybe it set him back six lifetimes, whatever that means. It reflected my understanding at the time.
Taking a vow does not stop wanting. Sometimes, taking a vow does lead to specific life style changes which eventually influence internal perspectives that can reduce and maybe even bring an end to wanting.
Many of the monks and Buddhist students I knew were the younger ones who were still working through layers of conditioning. Wanting things to be different than they are comes from the way we mentally process everything to create our experience of life. We are taught to want things to be different than they are from zygote to grave.
We can be untaught.
One, turn-off auto-responders.
Two, begin to see things purely as they are.
Three, note that Impermanence rules over everything.
Right Mindfulness means being aware of how we’re processing everything, and that what we’re processing is impermanent, which nips wanting and desire in the bud before suffering even gets a chance, or so I hear.
We’re not just talking about noticing where you’re stressed up. Most forms of Buddhism get very specific about what to notice, which is all five ways (the Five Skandhas) anything can be, all the time.
- Other people and stuff, (Form)
- Sensations (Relational, Unfiltered)
- Perceptions (Filtered, Categorized)
- Mental Formulations (Complex Pre-Set Responses)
- Consciousness (Discernment, seeing all aspects and components)
How does anyone possibly stay on top of all this?
I don’t believe that it can be accomplished by trying really hard or through grittiness or extraordinary will power. I think the idea that we can is aided and abetted by the Mayo Clinic’s version of Mindfulness not-so-subtly suggesting that we as individuals have to focus intensely. I don’t believe that Right Mindfulness comes about through focusing intnsely.
I don’t think Mindfulness can be willed into a situation any more than David Merrill thinks we learn things by just sitting there and trying. My view is that training attention over time through specific exercises, like meditation, gradually and naturally results in a more mindful way of being in the world.
Participation
A meditation is a step out of life as we normally relate to the flow of events during most of our waking hours.
Meditation styles are sometimes categorized as Object-Focused or Free Floating. My preference is a little of both. When I meditate, I like to have an object to rest my attention on lightly. When I lead a meditation, I try to provide that object.
In this Meditation, the object is a series of simple truths we all know that the Buddha said are helpful to be reminded of daily.
I state them one at time, leaving at least a minute of silence:
I will get sick, I am not beyond sickness
I will age, I am not beyond aging
I am responsible for the results of my actions, I am not beyond Karma
I will die, I am not beyond mortality
I will lose everything I have and everyone I love because nothing is beyond impermanence.
The last statement elicits the most sadness for most people. The first time. It is not as shocking to hear pronounced in such a direct and unvarnished manner the next time. As a regular practice, it brings what we appreciate to the foreground, every day.
Then a personal question: Why are you engaged in this Meditation and what do you hope will be different now that you are?
Probably things still won’t be the way anyone wants after this Meditation. But by staying curious about what’s going on in all the Skandhas, over time perspectives change.
Please don’t take my word for anything. Question every way you can. Decide for yourself. Get used to Uncertainty along the way and its first cousin, Not-Knowing.
Absolute certainty isn’t something I can ever remember wanting or needing. I remember asking my Mom when I was five about time ending and she said it wouldn’t which made me dizzy and sick to my stomach for a minute but I kept thinking about it and got used to not knowing.
Canoeing the winding river systems of eastern Massachusetts are that way too, old rivers with a teeny gradient cutting curved pathways to avoid obstacles instead of blowing straight through them like a more energetic river would. Makes it all Not-Knowing what’s around the corner, because there’s another corner just ahead after this one.
That’s my idea of canoeing and this has been my idea of an Instructional Design for Mindfulness, in the form of a Meditation.
Except for the best part.
Just kidding. There is no best part. I said it that way to sneak past the auto-responders and make sure we don’t blow off what really is the way our experience gets integrated into who we are.
Reflection
If you had told me after I read ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson when it was published in 1984 that Cyberspace, a term Gibson coined, would still be a niche phenomenon 35 years later in 2021, I would have been surprised and disappointed.
I am disappointed now, suffering from not fully accepting the way things are with what is called Virtual Reality at this time.
Spatial Media like VR is different than the 2D screens and surfaces most of us have been using forever. People connecting live in time is commonplace. A Zoom call is three-dimensional, time played out over the X and Y axis on-screen.
Gibson’s, ‘Cyberspace’ was about connecting live in time and space. You and the others are not where they are, because they are with you. They are with you in a place that has depth: X, Y and Z in the headset, where we interact live and our interactions play out together in time over four dimensions now.
This Meditation was first offered in a scheduled Cyberspace event. Niche doesn’t have to mean non-existent. The event is known as Mindfulness Monday and the people present in their avatar forms heard the Instructional Design for Mindfulness Meditation and then talked about it together.
Thousands of people in 2021 are attending Meditations in virtual worlds that celebrate nature, and humanity as a part of nature. Immersive spaces that aren’t dystopian have helped people connect with others and themselves around easy, guided practice. Checking-In afterward flows from the shared meditation experience.
There is more to be learned about Social Meditation in VR but I already believe that the opportunity for Reflection afforded by the spatial media environment is an inherent advantage. Just to help ensure it happens would be enough, but to reflect out loud and to be heard by others and to hear others from different backgrounds and sensibilities doing the same thing brings new insights and gently moves meditation into the rest of life.
