with thanks to @baoteching for indulging my initial articulation of these thoughts via DM, and for proofreading this draft
Your Course Is Sus
I don’t trust most courses in the tpot ecosystem. Put simply, I think the people running them are underqualified.
The folks I am thinking of are in their 30s and 40s. This is technically long enough to have developed deep expertise, but you’d need to have started quite young, or have discovered some prodigious natural talent later in life. Both cases require focused, extremely diligent practice, which takes time.
The general personality profile around here is someone who acquired trauma, and has explored healing it, with some amount of success. Often this is through reading, being an autodidact, some form of dabbling, and - I suspect but cannot prove - sorta stumbling on something that works well for them.
This is, unequivocally, a good thing. It is good for people to learn practices that heal their traumas!
It is also very natural to look back and think gee, if only someone had explained this one thing juuuuust right, I could have got here so much faster. Because boy, it feels great to be where you are now - the things that previously held you back are no more! Of course you want to share this with people…
But at this point, even assuming you are fully healed and have done all your integration work - at best you have had the set of breakthroughs YOU needed. For your body, with your life history.
The gap between being a practitioner and a teacher
But do you know how to walk people who started from other places to the end point? Or are you assuming that this one weird trick that worked for you will also work for others?
Do you know the contraindications? What other practices, lifestyles, ways of being might interact with your teaching badly?
Do you know where the pitfalls are? Do you know the places where people can get stuck and make things worse for themselves? Do you know what to do when something goes wrong, how to intervene and get them out?
Adverse experiences are under-discussed even in the meditation community, a practice that’s literally thousands of years old. (Props to Cheetah House for their important research, support, and educational work.) Do you understand them in your discipline, or did you just get lucky during your personal practice?
And this is assuming you have truly done your own work to a sufficient degree. This is something really difficult to judge for yourself - it is easy to understand something intellectually but not emotionally; easy to have a breakthrough and think you’ve got it, but then it slips; easy to have blind spots that you miss, or even use spiritual bypassing to cover over.
If you’ve been a seeker for a long time, becoming a teacher is a nice way to give your identity a graduation ceremony. Being a teacher proves to yourself that you Get It. Don’t you?
The money thing
What qualifies as “worth it” varies from person to person and I can’t really speak to it. But two things stick in my craw:
- Many people in this community are looking for something, anything, that will make them feel better. It feels gross to say “this could be it… if you pay me”.
- To me, they feel expensive for what you get. From hundreds of dollars for a few articles and videos, to thousands for a cohort style approach (relying mostly on pre-baked course materials or interaction between participants).
Okay, buddy. Isn’t this your bullshit speaking?
Maybe. It’s possible I’m hiding my lack of skill in many areas behind excuses of “it’s difficult”, and that being able to make meaningful positive change in my life with 10-20 hours of focused practice would be a humiliating exposé of my laziness and self-victimization. Getting up in arms about people charging for content I haven’t even experienced would be a great distraction tactic.
I do think that sharing your hard-won understanding is a kind and noble thing to do. It’s very nice when people do it for free. But there is a big difference between sharing your personal experience and being a teacher, and my antenna go up when I start hearing “and I’ll teach you how if you pay me”. I think that’s still true no matter how much of my own bullshit I’m covering for here.
Show me your credentials
Not a story of your personal journey, not a list of gushing testimonials. Credentials.
Mental health practitioners such as PsyDs, LICSWs, LMFTs, and many others need thousands of hours of clinical supervision prior to getting their license. Coaches have certifications indicating hundreds of hours of qualifying education, plus assessment and examination.
I teach nothing and have no experience working for a credentialling authority, so it’d be hypocritical for me to propose an outline of what responsible teaching might look like in this space. But here are some things I find myself wondering:
- What is your training?
- Who trained you?
- How long did you practice?
- What were the mechanisms of feedback as you learned to apply what you know?
- Were there examinations? A lineage process?
- Is there an external body to whom you are accountable?
- How have you validated and reviewed your course content?
When this information is missing, I assume that little to no rigorous, supervised training has happened, and that the person is an autodidact who’s put something together based on their personal experience.
Your mileage may vary, and if you’ve taken one of these courses and found value, I’m genuinely happy for you. But personally, I need to see more: someone who has truly done their personal work and also has spent real time learning how to be a good teacher and guide for others.