In the year 2000, I was living in Brisbane, Australia, and becoming increasingly disillusioned with the goals of our modern society. It seemed absurd to spend the majority of your time working for food and shelter, eagerly awaiting the weekend and that one longer vacation once a year. My growing interest in Buddhism began when I learned mindfulness techniques to improve my performance and control my emotions while training to become a professional tennis player. This led me to a Chenrezig Buddhist Institute on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.
I decided to follow my heart and ‘step out of the rat race.’ I gave away the few possessions I had and moved to the Buddhist community, where I soon had the privilege of staying in a retreat hut secluded on the 160-acre property in the center.
I volunteered as a receptionist in the Dharma shop and participated in the full-time study program followed by monks, nuns, and serious lay practitioners. It was a wonderful lifestyle studying Buddhism with the community, working only 15-20 hours a week, hanging out in the Big Love Café, engaging in deep discussions, and meeting some amazing people from around the world.
I loved delving into the philosophical study that got to the core of what reality truly was and the best way to live as a human being. I enjoyed my daily practice, focusing on generating great compassion for all sentient beings and meditating. My hut was very primitive without electricity or running water, but that was its charm, and it was an incredible experience to live there for so long. Literally carrying water and chopping wood for the fire as the Zen saying goes.
After a few years, on a fateful day in 2002, I was working at the reception when a visitor came in saying that there were people waiting in the meditation room for a guided meditation session. The person scheduled to lead the meditation had forgotten to show up. There was some embarrassment among the management, but no one wanted to step up, so I eagerly volunteered. As a former tennis coach, I was not shy about teaching people or speaking in front of an audience, so I borrowed a singing bowl from the shop, ran up the steep hill to the meditation room, sat on the cushion, and led my first guided meditation.
Apparently, I was good at it and began leading meditation sessions regularly. It soon became clear that I was not strictly following the orthodox Tibetan Buddhist approach. I always ‘freestyled’ my lessons, not reading from a book like others would, but spontaneously guiding people from my own knowledge and experience from my own practice and study. I always prayed and meditated myself before giving a lesson, and during the lessons, I felt like I was channeling a higher/deeper state of consciousness that wasn’t actually ‘me.’ It was very rewarding and a beautiful experience to have the honor of guiding people in that way, and I felt like I benefited as much from leading the class as others did from being guided.
In a debate, an older nun once told me that I should teach beginners about hell, not as a psychological state, as I saw it, but as an actual place where people will go if they commit negative karmic deeds. I was told that people were not there to relax or feel good but to learn the harsh reality of the human condition. I disagreed with that approach.
This tension between myself and the orthodoxy grew steadily until the breaking point came when a woman who attended one of my guided meditations experienced a sort of mini-orgasm while doing the breathing exercises. She decided to talk to one of the nuns about her experiences to gain clarity on what had happened to her, and all hell broke loose. I was summoned again by the senior nun and asked exactly what I was teaching people. I told them I was teaching breathing exercises, visualization, and other exercises, but unfortunately, these were considered tantric in nature and meant to be secret in that specific Buddhist tradition.
I was told in no uncertain terms that if I wanted to teach, I had to leave the premises and do it somewhere else, and that’s when my quest began to teach in my own way.
When I say I teach ‘in my own way,’ it’s actually not as unique or original as it sounds. My style of understanding and teaching comes from great meditation masters who have also taught advanced practices to beginners in modern times and translated ancient teachings into the vernacular of the current culture. One of those teachers was Lama Thubten Yeshe, who ironically founded that specific Buddhist center and many more around the world, and he would teach in this way. He even wrote a book on advanced practices, which far from being secret, was available to anyone who purchased it. When I brought all of this up during one of my ‘meetings’ with the nuns, they said he was an enlightened master, so he could do it, but I couldn’t.
I don’t consider myself in any way an enlightened master, but the techniques I learned were also similar to pranayama (breathing techniques) found in an average yoga class and actually not so complicated and easy to learn. Lama Yeshe said this is why they are perfect for Westerners, easy to learn, and achieve quick results. I wholeheartedly agreed, as I experienced the results myself and saw it in others too.
I continued to lead guided meditations at the center, but a nun attended my next few sessions to keep an eye on me, and I was instructed to only teach the basics of mindfulness and other beginner exercises, which were not exercises at all but more like reading Buddhist teachings. I wasn’t even allowed to turn off the lights or light a candle, which I had been doing until then, because that was considered ‘new age’ and unrelated to meditation according to the fundamentalists in power at the time. I was also told that people couldn’t lie down and had to sit upright. I would teach the proper meditation posture, but I would also allow people to feel as comfortable as they wanted, even if it meant lying down. One particular person had a back injury and unfortunately stopped coming to the sessions because she couldn’t lie down during the sessions. So while the terrible fluorescent lights shone brightly and everyone sat comfortably upright or not, I tried to continue teaching lessons at the Buddhist Institute.
It all began when I filled in for a nun who was teaching meditation classes outside the Institute. The nun had started leading a regular group near Maroochydore, and when I filled in for her, as Frank Sinatra said, “I did it my way.” It was far from the center, and my clear instructions were to teach me only the way ‘off the grounds.’ However, when the nun returned to take over the class, a few students secretly told me they preferred my meditations. They invited me to secretly lead a guided meditation in one of their garages, and that’s when my ‘career’ as a meditation teacher really began.
My meditation group quickly found a more suitable location (not in a garage) in a beautiful hall in nature, and the class grew. I left the Buddhist Institute and my sangha (Buddhist community), which had somewhat rejected me, and also left behind my beloved meditation hut where I eventually lived for a total of five years and re-entered the world. I started recording a few classes and began my own website where I posted the recordings and started writing blogs, and that was the birth of The Way of Meditation and my career as a meditation teacher.
Written by Chad Foreman
Chad Foreman is the founder of The Way of Meditation and has been teaching meditation since 2003, determined to bring authentic meditation practices into the lives of millions of people in the modern world. Chad is a former Buddhist monk who lived in a retreat hut for six years, studying and practicing meditation full-time. He now has over twenty years of experience teaching meditation. Chad regularly holds meditation retreats on the Sunshine Coast, Australia, offers online meditation coaching, and has three online programs – The 21-Day Meditation Challenge to gradually guide people from the basics of mindfulness and relaxation to deep states of consciousness, Breathwork to help manage stress and go deeper into meditation, and The Bliss of Inner Fire (Tibetan Kundalini) to purify energy blockages and connect with the bright light of bliss.
Now, Chad has over 210,000 followers on his Facebook page The Way of Meditation, reaching millions of people monthly with his posts and also offering online meditation coaching. He continues to find his place as a meditation teacher balancing the traditional aspects of Tibetan Buddhism with the growing modern secular approaches to mindfulness.
Ironically, the meditation that the nuns tried to stop me from teaching is now one of my popular guided meditations and blogs. It’s called Tummo the Bliss of Inner Fire (Tibetan Kundalini), and I continue to teach it in my retreats and now have an online course that people seem to love and benefit greatly from.
I hope to continue teaching, learning, and growing myself from the honor and privilege of teaching meditation. I hope to help people connect with the inherent positive qualities of their own minds and awaken the Buddha nature, which I believe is one of the most urgently needed transformations in this modern world.