Here’s How I Teach Compassion

Although Jon Aaron first came across meditation in the 1970s, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s — when he started noticing patterns in his relationships that he wanted to address — that he took a deeper dive into meditation. It took a while to find the right teacher, but once he did, he realized he had been getting in his own way, obstructing the progress of his life because of the way he was identifying himself. “As soon as I let go of that and let life live through this body, then everything became much lighter,” he says. Today, Jon has been a meditation teacher for more than a decade, specializing in mindfulness, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MSBR) and insight (Vipassana) meditation. He has given workshops and classes for organizations as diverse as ABC, the New York Open Center, Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers, NYU Medical School, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Jon’s primary dharma teacher has been Matthew Flickstein, with whom he studied Buddhist meditation in the Theravada and non-dual traditions.