Inner Teacher Training

When you meditate, you’re both the student meditating and the teacher, because you’re the one who tells yourself what to do, and you’re the one who has to check up and see the results. And if they’re not good, try to figure out what to do next.

You have outside teachers in the flesh, in books, in recordings, but it’s the inside teacher who has to digest their lessons and figure out how to apply them—and then make sure they get applied. That’s the role of mindfulness and alertness.

When the Buddha taught his son, he started out with teaching him how to train his inner teacher, what kind of questions to ask. The inner teacher was supposed to look at every action you were doing and examine it in terms of the intention. If you thought that it was going to harm anybody, you shouldn’t do it. Then while you were acting on your good intentions, if you saw that there was no harm intended but that some did harm come up, then you should got to stop.

And then when the results came in over the long term after the action was done, you had to decide whether it was harmful or not. If it was harmful in spite of your original understanding, then you have to learn from your mistake. You have to go make up your mind you’re not going to repeat that mistake and then go talk it over with someone else—and then digest that person’s lessons. If you saw that no harm was done, then you should take joy in the fact that you were progressing.

This is training your inner teacher. Sometimes it’s called the inner critic, as if all it could do is criticize. And for some people that’s what it seems to be.

But here you’re training it so that it can be useful: giving it the right questions to ask, giving it the right things to look for, so that you can internalize good lessons. In that way, the Dhamma becomes your own—not in the sense that your Dhamma is different in principle from the Buddha’s, but just in the sense that he gives you the basic outline, and you’ve got to fill in the outline to apply it to your thoughts, your words, your deeds, your situation in the course of the day. That’s where the inner teacher comes in.

So. Train your inner teacher so that it’s helpful. If it starts making demands that are unreasonable, realize that it’s no longer your inner teacher. It’s just some random voice, an old habit. But you do want to be on top of what you’re doing. If you find yourself making mistakes over and over and over again, you have to ask yourself, where is your inner teacher? If it’s off on vacation, that’s not going to be good.

The inner teacher has to work 24/7. So make sure it’s well trained; make sure that it’s on the job and that it’s really helpful in the practice. Then your practice has a chance to grow.