In 2015, I was invited to train to be a Community Dharma Leader. Many of my peers were using this two-year commitment to feel readied to be a meditation teacher.
I was adamant that I would never teach meditation.
How could I? I had been hanging around dharma spaces for seven years, and still couldn’t access mindful breathing or any kind of daily practice.
I had learned from many teachers, and they all seemed to talk first and foremost about a breathing practice. I felt so distant from this, I was reticent to even consider myself a Buddhist.
Can you even be a Buddhist without a practice of mindful breathing?
You may be like — Dawn! You know that there are so many alternative anchors to the breath! And even that the diverse traditions of Buddhism have a range of practices beyond meditation. Why were you so stressed about this? Just focus on a different part of the body, or sound, or maybe your metta phrases. Or say your bodhisattva vows or other mantras. You know this! You teach this!
And while I know this deeply in 2026, I didn’t have any concept of this in 2015 when I began the Community Dharma Leader (CDL) training. It wasn’t simply my misunderstanding — I felt it as a community-wide lack of information. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness wouldn’t be published for another three years in February 2018. We said little about how mindfulness meditation could exacerbate symptoms of trauma, or how the breath in particular can be activating to the sympathetic nervous systems fight or flight responses.
It can feel disorienting to try to tell the story of then, when we have such a different understanding now. It’s phenomenal to think about how much change in thought has happened in the last 7-10 years. I’m aware that before new thought is established culturally, before new information is surfaced and a new story told, this way of thinking is completely illegible. Even teachers who were successful in helping me find additional options for a meditation anchor had little to say about why my breathing would hitch so quickly. I’m grateful they knew the Buddha’s teachings to know there were many other anchors available. But even my senior teachers didn’t know what to say about why I couldn’t breathe.
I’m grateful to my CDL teachers — Larry Yang, Gina Sharpe, Erin Treat, Sebene Selassie, Pamela Weiss, DaRa Williams, and Eugene Cash — who had the good sense to let me thrash about whether I could teach mindfulness when I failed miserably at connecting with mindfulness of the breath. Erin helped me find sound as a more neutral anchor for my practice. Larry had helped me feel confident that whether I ever taught meditation or not, CDL was ultimately a leadership development program rooted in the dharma. As a Co-Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship at the time, I felt keen to build my skills to be a better dharma leader.
It’s intense to consider how much I minimized my dharma learning, how my sense of inadequacy in my meditative breathing practices overshadowed all the rest of my deep love of dharma. It had been seven years since I walked through Durango Dharma Center’s doors, quickly a regular on Monday nights and in the Next Generation Sangha for younger practitioners. I intentionally moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011 for a trio of interests — spirituality, sexuality, and social justice. Landing in Oakland at the East Bay Meditation Center, I soaked up dharma wisdom in year long programs Practice in Action with Mushim Ikeda and Commit 2 Dharma with Larry Yang (Commit 2 Dharma soon to be reprised with fellow CDL graduates René Rivera and Patrick Brown). I had three years of leadership at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship under my belt. After re-orienting the organization toward anti-racist direct action in response to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, I was preparing to take what we had learned on the road with our Dharma and Direct Action trainings. Without a doubt, I was deeply committed to both learning and teaching dharma.
Yet I still felt woefully inadequate to teach meditation practice. After seven years of study, mindfulness of breath still felt like the one and only meditation practice. If I didn’t understand that, what would I be teaching?
With continued teacher support, I finally started to feel okay that I wasn’t worried about the breath in my own day-to-day practice. But I still felt stymied: how could I teach mindfulness without teaching mindfulness of the breath? Even if a practice of hearing sound was perhaps adequate, could I teach mindfulness without any kind of routine daily practice? It seemed like the thing every teacher was obsessed with, and I had no idea how to do it. Everyone else made it sound so easy — you just learn the practice and then do the practice.
Except for weirdos like me who couldn’t learn the practice and couldn’t do the practice. Wouldn’t people want to learn from the real experts who could drop in to the breath and practice with it every day? Who on earth would want to learn from me?
While these internalized self-judgments were so specific to breath meditation — fat people perhaps can see a familiar refrain:
Who would want to engage with me? I am nobody.
Why would I think I know something useful? I am stupid and can’t do anything right.
Why would I think I could engage in a useful way with my body? I am fat.
My friends in Socratic Coaching might be asking, “Do you have a problem with not being able to teach mindful breathing? Or do you have a problem with internalized fat phobia that gets projected onto anything and everything your body tries to do?”
More to come on the tools I’ve used to excavate this deeper level of internalized fat phobia, that doesn’t trust my body to do anything right.
I feel like everyone’s journey with mindfulness and dharma is so unique, as unique as we all are, and as universal. 🙏