Empty Curriculum, Empty Mind: Teaching Mindfulness with Military Veterans

Abstract

This conceptual essay places the Buddhist notion of sunyata, or emptiness, at the heart of the enterprise of teaching mindfulness with military veterans. It is a term that brings before us the necessity of having an open and “unknowing” mind, one that frees both students or clients and instructor from becoming mired in routinized, autopilot modes of psychotherapy delivery. While attention to the teaching of mindfulness has centered on the training of instructors and their employment of manualized treatment modalities, this essay shifts the emphasis to what humanistic psychologists and educationalists have termed variously fusion-knowledge (Maslow) and the live classroom (G. I. Brown). Humanistic psychological insights are brought in dialogue with the fields of knowledge management and organizational learning and, most important, transformative learning theory. The author’s group-based delivery of mindfulness in the Veterans Health Administration setting provides an example of a curriculum that is collaboratively generated and based in the ongoing creation of a common vocabulary for living and thinking mindfully. An expansive, improvisational approach to teaching mindfulness is posited as beneficial for the creation of new forms of awareness that shape our psychological and intellectual relations to the lived world.