Spiritual Friendship
Helping the Dharma Take Root in the Next Generation

An Interview with Michele McDonald

“… Admirable friends, admirable companions, admirable comrades. This is the first prerequisite for the development of the wings to self-awakening.”

 -- The Buddha

Michele McDonald has practiced vipassana meditation since 1975, when she attended the last two weeks of the first three-month vipassana retreat taught in the U.S. Today, she is an IMS core faculty member, who has been teaching since 1982 and leading meditation retreats for youth since 1989. Michele has a deep interest in preserving the ancient teachings and finding ways to make them more accessible and authentic in our time, without compromising their essence. In conversation with 'Insight Newsletter', she explores one way in which the dharma is taking root in our culture – through the offering of teachings to young people.

Michele, what drew you to vipassana practice?

When I was a child, I noticed that the adults in my life – both my parents and others around me – were suffering greatly. To get a break from the intensity of the unhappiness, I spent a lot of time alone at a lake near where I lived. I’d sit by the water under the trees, basically watching my breath and just being in nature. I discovered that stillness and peace arose if I sat quietly for long enough. I grew to love the shift that occurred in my mind as I opened to the mystery of experiencing things directly, beyond thought.

As a child, I didn’t have the strength of mind to deal with the sorrow that surrounded me. There was a painful gap between my experience of the dharma in the natural world and my experience of deep suffering in ordinary human life. That suffering grew with me into my teens and twenties. I didn’t have any support for practice. I felt like I was waiting for something – the chance to undertake formal training. Then, when I was twenty-four, I sat my first meditation retreat. I knew immediately that this was what I had been waiting for.

What inspires you to teach meditation?

Touching the truth directly is like drinking honey – our hearts open with each drop. I love sharing that process with others. Offering the teachings is a sacred privilege. With the intention to understand someone, it’s possible to bring a joyful interest to whatever comes up for them, from boredom, to karmic knots, to delight.

Resistance is so painful for all of us. I find there are two ways to work with that struggle. One is to find the key to someone’s spiritual strength, that which really allows a person to relax and concentrate. The other way is to help a person have enough mindfulness and compassion to open to things as they are – no matter how difficult. The art of both teaching and meditation practice is learning how to find a doorway to stillness and strength and then gradually applying that ability so that we can awaken to everything that happens.

You are recognized as a leading vipassana teacher of teens and young adults in this country. How did you come to teach the dharma to young people?

Sayadaw U Pandita, the renowned Burmese meditation master, offered the first IMS retreat for teens in 1989. Steve Smith, to whom I was married at the time, assisted Sayadaw, and I helped as well. Steve was profoundly inspired; from then on we became the driving force in establishing this retreat as an annual IMS event. Also, Chandra, my teenage stepdaughter, sat the course.

So, my family was deeply involved in IMS’s programming for teens from the start, but I had a lot of hesitation. I was reluctant to face the emotional residue from my own difficult teen years, which I knew would come up.

Despite my initial uncertainty, I find that sharing the dharma with young people stretches my heart and opens my mind in ways that I consider invaluable and, I hope, reciprocal. This kind of spiritual friendship is informed by an understanding of what might have helped me to get through those thorny growing-up years with greater ease.

The Buddha said, as mentioned in the commentary on the Dhammapada, that the sooner in life we begin our practice, the more likely we are to become fully enlightened beings. If we can share the dharma with people when they are young, they’ll have more time to develop their practice. Some of the people who attended those early teen retreats have now been practicing for sixteen years. As a result, they have a strong practice at a young age – the sweetest offering they can give the world. It’s wonderful to be able to help make that possible.

Are there aspects of teaching that are particular to working with young people?

During that first teen retreat, Steve and I discovered that there’s no need to teach the dharma differently to teens. We don’t water it down – in fact, we step it up. Many people think we might have to change something or hold something back, but we’ve found that the younger generation responds to the teachings just like everyone else, only quicker.

I find that young people today are more educated, talented and sophisticated than my peers and I were at the same age, but they suffer from an incredible weariness. They’re inundated with information from a very young age, and our culture places high expectations on them. The pressure to be perfect is accelerating with each generation. The drive to be successful, rich, multi-talented and beautiful can manifest in so much self-hatred. For many young people, a meditation retreat is their first exposure to a way of facing up to and letting go of that suffering. The challenges of growing up in modern Western culture make young people really ripe for meditation practice.

Because the stress for young people living in our materialistic culture is so great, I find that it’s helpful for teens to be taught lovingkindness practice (metta) right from the beginning. Metta is crucial for dealing with feelings of self-loathing. Facing the deterioration of so many aspects of life on the planet calls for an ability to appreciate ourselves and others just as we are. This softens the heart and allows us to accept things in a healthy way.

Young people come to the dharma with a refreshing receptivity to the teachings. This is just natural as they tend to be less bound by habits of mind that get developed over the years. Many have the courage to search deeply – they really want to know that freedom is possible.

Are there particular themes that frequently arise when you teach young people?

Paradoxically, young people need a safe and protected space in which to be wild, radical and question every convention. They don’t want a spiritual practice in which they lose sight of the importance of respecting the relationships they have. Questions about their relations with partners, friends and parents tend to be extremely important.

Part of our intention is to provide a safe and sacred container for inquiry into morality. With the support of the silence, precepts and discussion groups, as well as the nonjudgmental intention to understand our experience, profound honesty emerges. Young people need to challenge aspects of their lives that they find confusing, unbearable or unacceptable. In many cases our society expects them to just believe a certain set of rules for life. However, they need to learn wise and respectful inquiry.

As people reach their twenties, questions of right livelihood and social justice gain significance. They’re facing the challenge of how to separate from their parents – with some dignity – and how to live on their own. Many want to work less and consume less. Often, in their minds, the pursuit of a peaceful heart includes dedication to social justice, environmental issues, kindness and sharing. Like all of us, they want to transcend the mundane, but they also want to create a way of life that reflects compassion. Therefore, they have much to offer our world.

I find that young people come to the practice with an eye on figuring out how to live. They tend to be looking for a liberation practice that can be integrated and fully embodied within all aspects of their lives rather than just a retreat they can come to and then leave behind.

The practice of meditation is becoming a part of the fabric of our culture. What is your vision for the dharma in the West in the coming decades?

The world issues facing young people are catastrophic. The dharma is more and more necessary. We need the vision of people who value moving toward full enlightenment and who bring the dharma into ordinary life. The health and survival of our communities, our local cultures and our economies depends on the myriad ways the dharma expresses itself – generosity, morality, kindness and contentment.

In the coming decades we need to define the meaning of spiritual friendship. Spiritual friendship makes life worth living. My hope is that spiritual friendships in the sangha here in the West will continue to grow and out of these deepening connections a greater understanding of the dharma will be born.

I would like to see young people fathom the ancient roots of this practice as a basis to understand reality. I hope they will be able to examine the ways in which the dharma has been transplanted into our culture and change it in a way that makes sense to them in their lifetime. It would also be great if my dream of having young people help create a center in Hawaii would come true soon.