Inner Alchemy

Introduction

Some years ago, I dreamt that the paint pots I left behind in my year 6 classroom were still bubbling away alchemically on the shelf. When I told a colleague about my dream, he laughed and said “I hope it wasn’t Prussian blue!” because it smells terrible when it is left in the jar for too long. I wondered what the dream could be trying to communicate, but until I returned to that school to give a professional development talk on mindfulness to the teachers in the room next door to my old classroom I was not aware of how much unfinished business I had there. Intense emotions from the past bubbled up into my awareness while presenting, and luckily I was able to take some time in the break to practice a short, grounding mindfulness meditation and appreciate that the situation was mirroring back to me something I needed to explore inwardly.

In retrospect, I was lucky to experience this realization in situ, since I share Shaefer’s (2012) view that, while schools can be profound learning communities for children, they are seldom conscious learning communities for adults. As I reflected later I realized that the “transformative potency” (Osterhold, Rubiano, & Nicol, 2007, p. 222) of this experience could be drawn upon to assist teachers to tap into their own self-knowledge and inner wisdom to respond more effectively to “disorienting dilemmas” (Mezirow, 2000) at work. Much teacher professional development is focused on knowledge dissemination and training (Webster-Wright 2009), despite widespread agreement that reflection is at the heart of transformation (Webster-Wright, 2013). As Rosch (2007) has argued, we need an alternative mode of sensing, knowing, and feeling if we are to transform our personal and professional dilemmas and problems. There is a need to go beyond talking and writing about transformative learning to include more holistic and experiential ways of knowing that directly involve the body, feelings, and intuition as well as cognition (Ferrer, Romero, & Albareda, 2005).

Like Rosch (2007), I have found through my own practice that mindfulness is a valuable methodology for learning about the mind, consciousness, and our inner being in a manner that allows for the arising of uncertainties and creative epiphanies. I felt that teachers would be likely to benefit from professional learning that was tailored to their needs, issues, and contexts and created a place for stillness in school life to allow for the development of inner wisdom and more effective responding to challenging situations. I therefore decided to conduct a qualitative study building on two previous studies (Burrows, 2011a, 2011b) to explore whether teachers’ practice of mindful inquiry (mindfulness practice and reflection) in relation to a disorienting dilemma at work could contribute to the development of greater self-awareness and self-knowledge through a process of “learning from the inside out” (Osterhold et al., 2007).

Mindfulness

A number of studies have already demonstrated the benefits of mindfulness practice for teachers. Mindfulness has been shown to have a positive influence on self-awareness, emotional awareness, and self-regulation (Jennings, Lantieri, & Roeser, 2012) and calm responding to challenging student behaviors (Ekman, n.d.; Jennings et al., 2012; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Roeser, Skinner, Beers, & Jennings, 2012). In the main, these studies have been conducted from the perspective of “mindfulness science” and are based on what Black (n.d.) calls the “landmark definition” of mindfulness which led to the development of similar definitions: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1991, cited in Black, n.d.)

Well-known programs working from a mindfulness science orientation include mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based cognitive behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy. These programs are in the main created around mindfulness of the breath sitting practices that take effort, time, practice, and preparation and have been described by Dunne (2004) as “systematic,” “technical,” and “manualized,” with set practices, timelines, and developmental trajectories. As Webster-Wright (2009) has noted, professional development for teachers requires flexible, accessible, and supportive practices and time frames and activities tailored to suit their existing capacities and contexts. An individualized and experiential approach to mindfulness attuned to moment-to-moment workplace learning, and adult-learning styles with the capacity to draw out innate capacities was therefore required rather than a prepackaged program.

An alternative approach to mindfulness already deeply familiar to me as a long-time meditator is “nondual” mindfulness, which Dunne (2004) sees as somewhat “contrarian,” standing as it does outside mainstream concepts of mindfulness. In the nondual approach, mindfulness capacity is understood to be already present within the individual waiting to be catalyzed by the presence of someone who has already had experience of the state of nonduality—a “primordial, natural awareness” (Prendergast, n.d.)—in which all things are understood to be connected and not separate, while at the same time retaining their individuality. In the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti’s (1971/2005, p. 97) words “To bring about a radical transformation in society and oneself, the observer must undergo a tremendous change—that is to realize that the observer and the observed are one.”

In spiritual practice, nondualism has traditionally been oriented toward a change in perspective or a different way of seeing (Pillay, 2007). In the nondual orientation, practices are adjusted to suit individual propensities and capacities, with an inherent suspicion of systematizing and an openness to the process being intuitive and effortless, something I was drawn to for this study, since it seemed more aligned to my own orientation to mindfulness, teacher professional learning, and research as well as teachers’ needs and contexts.

The Study

In this article, I report on the findings from conducting face-to-face and online research on the professional learning project over a period of 6 weeks with 25 teachers in 8 independent schools in 5 states of Australia. Teachers participating in professional development seminars on relationships and well-being were invited to participate in a study exploring the potential of mindfulness practice to assist with a disorienting dilemma in the form of a student, colleague, or parent at work and shown how to do the mindfulness practices. Thirty-four people began the study and 25 remained at the end of the 6-week period. Participants were asked to:

identify a disorienting dilemma at work involving a student, parent, or colleague;

All the activities were designed to be easily integrated into participants’ working and personal lives without excessive demands on time. Underpinning the mindfulness professional learning project was a simple “innersensing” activity developed out of my own mindfulness practice and initially inspired by the work of Singh and colleagues (2007) with their “soles of the feet” meditation. Innersensing can be described as a subtle kind of “feeling awareness” (Ralston, 2006 p. 30) in which our perception is used to “feel into” the sensation of our bodies from the inside while at the same time being aware of what is happening around us. The practice seems to have a way of drawing back our attention from its unconscious enmeshment with thoughts, storylines, emotions, and situations into what nondual meditation teacher Conway (2007, p. 244) describes as “one’s native, natural condition right here … in a mysterious placeless place behind one’s old sense of self.”

This activity has advantages such as not taking up much time, being relatively simple and practical, not directly engaging with the resistant, rational, and skeptical mind-set often encountered in education and higher education settings, and not associated with esoteric practices from the East (Pillay, 2007). It therefore seemed appropriate for teachers working in secular, spiritual, or religious contexts. Participants also received weekly e-mail responses to their journal reflection to build a bridge of understanding, trust, empathy, and support as they explored their sensations and reactions.

Methodology

Given the sensitive nature of this research, the nondual focus and my desire to conduct research “with” people rather than “on” them I decided once again to use relational-centered inquiry methodology for this study. Finlay and Evans (2009) suggest that it is likely that relational researchers choose subjects to study that they already have a deep interest in and commitment to. In relational research, the cocreated relationship between researcher and participant is foregrounded in which the researcher seeks to build a bridge to the other, “using our special awareness, experience, skills, and knowledge” (Finlay & Evans, 2009, p. 3). In relational research, data are seen to emerge out of an evolving, dynamic, and interactional process “as the joint product of researchers and participants (and readers) and the relationships they build” (Finlay & Evans, 2009, p. 6).

The online component of this study, which included e-mail conversations as a source of data collection and use of pseudonyms, provided an opportunity for open-ended confidential conversations to occur to allow participants to express their views freely. E-mail as a communication medium has been found to elicit a deeper account of experience due in part to the freedom to respond in the times and spaces of participants’ choosing (Meho, 2006). For this study, qualitative data were made up of weekly journal entries e-mailed to the researcher.

Themes Arising From the Data

The initial dilemmas received before the mindfulness activities began indicated that participants were all facing situations that impacted significantly on their well-being at work and, in many cases, out of work. Teachers were dealing with situations involving students with special learning, emotional, and behavioral needs, complex disagreements with colleagues, bullying behaviors of parents, students, and colleagues, feeling judged, unsupported, unappreciated, and overwhelmed, the complexity of teaching colleagues’ children, feeling they were not trained to deal with the level of complexity, and heavy workloads and demands. Journal responses from participants are considered subsequently in the light of themes emerging as I read and reread the reflections. These themes are “consciously experiencing sensory phenomena,” “shifts in thinking and behavior,” “tapping into inner wisdom,” “feeling a sense of openness and refinement,” and “experiencing nondual mindfulness.”

Discussion

The themes explored earlier provide an illustration of the experience of an organically unfolding transformative process for teachers participating in a mindfulness professional development project. In only a few weeks of practice and reflection, participants experienced heightened awareness of their inner sensations, which led to them being able at times to interrupt the habitual flow of thoughts and calmly decide how to respond while feeling connected with others and the world around them.

The nature of this beginning journey of transformation is naturally part of an ongoing process. The teachers in this study actively participated in a process of tuning into themselves, becoming aware of unhelpful thoughts and feelings, letting go of fixed beliefs, deepening acceptance, and loosening their attachment to an individual problematic self through connecting with a mindful, nondual state. They gradually began to let go of unhelpful thoughts and beliefs about themselves and their dilemmas and began taking some personal and professional responsibility for how they were affected by them.

The pattern of the transformative events reflected in these themes suggests it is naturally cyclical as opposed to the linear progression portrayed in the current literature on mainstream “scientific mindfulness” approaches (Rich, 2011). For Rich, these imply a linear process within the control of the individual person who is at work rather than a series of spontaneously arising experiences and insights leading to a deep openness and connection to the world around them.

This study has highlighted the value of mindfulness in teacher professional development, the need to move beyond purely conceptual approaches (Webster-Wright, 2009, 2013), and the potential of the nondual approach (Pillay, 2007). It has demonstrated the power of an experiential approach to teacher professional learning in which it is possible to actually come to realize a new (nondual, mindful) mode of knowing and being that can be immensely transformative to individuals personally and professionally (Dunne, 2004; Pillay, 2007; Rosch, 2007; Webster-Wright, 2013).

This study has shown that through the experience of mindfulness and reflective practice, teachers were able to gain new insights into their dilemmas as well as feeling more compassion toward themselves and others and more able to see their situation from a nuanced and multidimensional perspective. As participants connected with the spaciousness within, they became less enmeshed with their thinking, feeling, and sensing and more able to act from the midst of complexity (Shotter, 2005). At the end of the project many participants reported either that the dilemma was no longer present or that their relationship with it had changed.

Limitations of the Study

Although the results of this study are promising and align with and extend previous research findings, this exploratory project involved a relatively small number of participants over a short time period. It is not possible to know how sustainable the changes were; however, they appeared to be authentic and highly meaningful and therefore have likely had an impact beyond the life of the project. Although the practice of mindfulness and journaling has been shown to have positive outcomes for the participants of the study, it needs to be acknowledged that a contribution to the success of the project may have been the background of the researcher. This study had the advantage of having a researcher who had her personal nondual mindfulness practice and was a trained counselor as well as an educational consultant with a background in education. For McCown, Reibel, and Micozzi (2010), it is essential to have a mindfulness guide who authentically embodies the spirit or essence of the practices being taught, which may be difficult to access for other professional learning projects. The significance of the teacher’s role is also emphasized in nondual approaches to mindfulness which sees that inner development can be suddenly catalyzed by being in the presence of someone who is more self-actualized/self-transcendent (Dunne, 2004). The positive findings may also be due in part to teachers joining the project because they were already aware to some degree of their difficulties. As Hick and Furlotte (2009, p. 22) found in their mindfulness research, the practices may have “fed into a dynamic that was already occurring in their lives.” These participants could therefore have already been at a turning point and thus “ripe for transformation.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is clear that this study’s findings are not limited to participants’ enhanced capacity to tune into sensory phenomena and to a shift in their thinking and behavior. Participants also experienced the existence of their own innate wisdom as well as greater openness and refinement of their entire being. It would appear they also had a genuine experience of nondual mindfulness however fleeting. Over time, it is likely that this process would continue particularly through further innersensing activity. I have found that once the process has been catalyzed and it has sufficiently taken hold, the new consciousness gradually begins to pervade one’s internal and external experience as a unified whole, transcending the boundary of the individual self. I also experienced an inner transformation through the process of conducting this research—as Rehorick and Bentz (2009) found through their transformative phenomenological research, the inquirer is also changed in the research process. This has continued to deepen within me and has made a significant contribution to how I viewed the data when writing this article, 18 months after collecting it.

Mindfulness training and teachers’ professional development is an emerging area of research and practice. This exploratory study supports previous research findings that professional learning is most effective when it addresses issues identified by teachers and is situated in relationships and contexts that support teacher learning. It has highlighted in particular the value of an alternative, nondual approach to mindfulness as a form of tailored teacher professional development, involving a flexible and spontaneous process of self-knowledge and the gaining of a fresh understanding of dilemmas at work grounded in body, emotions, and senses through an inside-out approach to learning. There is a need to conduct further research into nondual mindfulness as a form of teacher professional development with a longer time frame and with the aim of contributing to personal, professional, and institutional transformation in education. Any future studies will have adjustments made in the light of my deepening capacity to experience, understand, teach, and research nondual mindfulness.

As Mistlberger (2010, p. 149) has suggested, “to work with mindfulness is to transform both the work we do, and ourselves, as we work.” I began this article with a tale about a jar a little like Pandora’s one, with all its contents apart from Hope ready to be released. I finish with a comment from a research participant, “I’m a vessel for sensing impressions—no thinking involved, no processing, just receiving—open to whatever comes.”