What we teach here, basically all of it comes from within Theravadin Buddhism. Specifically the mental noting technique comes from a teacher in Burma who is now long dead, Mahasi Sayadaw.
He taught this use of mental noting. How far back it went before him we don't know. He was taught it by his teacher, maybe it goes all the way back to the Buddha, but it was never really recorded in the scriptures as a specific technique. So I am not too sure where it actually started from, but it is all from within Theravadin Buddhism.
As to the Compassion side of the practice, that is not from the Mahasi Sayadaw technique, but has been more developed through our own understanding of the practice, specifically the Four Noble Truths. Opening to Dukkha, seeing the cause and walking the path out of Dukkha
We also learned some basic Compassion/Lovingkindness meditations even before we met Buddhism in our Yoga practice. We had learned a little bit, and we learned more within Buddhism. We incorporated the Compassion/Lovingkindness a bit here and there, we tweaked it here and there. We made it a bit like what Sariputta taught in the scriptures, Evidently there is no place in the scriptures where the Buddha taught how to do Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation as to the phrases that you use, the expression of the wish.
The Buddha did teach to have Compassion/Lovingkindness for all beings living in the eight directions, as well as above and below, and to have Compassion/Lovingkindness for family, for friends and so on like that, but an actual phrase taught by him is not recorded
In the scriptures somewhere there is a phrase from Sariputta, from which we modeled ours. It has two main parts. One part is that you wish for the ending of Dukkha, the other part is that you wish happiness and peace of mind. So the phrases we teach look very similar to what Sariputta taught.
As to some of the more specific techniques that we teach, that we are giving you, say like the DD method, no teacher gave it to us, but we invented it as a technique. However, it basically comes from our understanding of the scriptures, especially the mustard seed story, Kisagotami. From that story we understood the universality of Dukkha, the universality of death. That everyone, everywhere experiences it and many people have it worse. From our understanding of that and our own life understanding, we invented the D/D method. The 1-10-11-1, we invented that also, in fact most of the reflections that we are giving you, we basically invented how to do them, no teacher gave us those in that form. However, they do come from the scriptures as we understand them.
A lot of the techniques we give are an attempt to illustrate our understanding of the Dhamma in a way people can comprehend and use to develop a similar understanding. The techniques are skilful means to develop an insight into the fundamentals of the Dhamma from the scriptures as we understand them.
When we started teaching we did not have as many of the techniques or stories we now do, we had the basic Compassion/Lovingkindness meditation and the Five Reflections. We didn't even have the Monopoly story until a few years ago, so along the way as we kept teaching, some of the stuff kind of came to us as we saw different people with different types of Dukkha. Things just developed as we tried to think of how could we get our understanding over to them.
When we taught the first 20 day retreat, that was the first time that we gave some of these new types of meditation, some that we are doing this retreat, some are different. When we taught that retreat it was the first time that we formalized some of the things we had just simply done in interviews with people. I think the 1-10-11-1, I first did that in an interview with someone who had so much self-pity, so much self-hatred. They were very down, and it came to me, "This is an idea to help them see how to get out of their self-pity." After doing it a few times in interviews, it then became a technique. So that is basically how a lot of our techniques have come to be, through our understanding of the Dhamma and then wording it in a way that people today would understand it.