Teachers Teach Us

Well this may shock some of you, but perhaps not all of you, but I have to admit it. I am a very naughty boy. I do hope I will be forgiven. A little while ago I received a letter through the post informing that I had been pictured travelling at 36 miles per hour (mph) on the Washway Road. The speed limit there is 30mph. I had two options pay a fine and 3 points on my license or go on a speed awareness course. I chose the latter and I am glad that I did. It was actually four hours well spent as it got me to think about my driving once again. As the course went on I remembered, I relearned, some things that I had forgotten. The course was taught well by two driving instructors. Yes there was one or two dissenting voices, who didn’t want to be there and thought that it was unjust that they were there. For me though it has had a very positive effect on my driving ever since. I am grateful for the lessons learnt and particularly the teaching.

I’ve been thinking a lot ever since about the many lessons I have learnt and re-learnt over the years and the many wise teachers I have known.

It came to my mind once again this week. I noticed picture after picture of friend’s children, in their uniforms, returning to school after the summer holidays. I’m sure that they had mixed feelings about this, some excited and others not too keen on the idea. I had thought about it too as I was returning to work last week after three weeks away. The day before I had experienced what I call “The Bulls Eye” effect. It is a familiar feeling to anyone who attended school in Britain in the 1980’s. It was a feeling that came on during Sunday teatime as the program “Bulls Eye”ended and I realized that in the morning I would be returning to school. I was talking about this feeling the other day as I was playing a board game with Sue. During the game I was asked which job do British people think is the hardest? I got the answer right, it was a school teacher. Now I’m sure that this would not have been the case thirty or forty years ago, but it is now. I can’t imagine what that feeling must be like over the Atlantic in America where some are suggesting that the teachers ought to be armed, due to increasing number of school shootings. Then of course there is the headteachers, there jobs seem the toughest of all.

It brought to mind the following…

Early one morning a mother went to her sleeping son and woke him up.

"Wake up, son. It's time to go to school."
"But why, Mama? I don't want to go to school."

"Give me two reasons why you don't want to go to school."
"One, all the children hate me. Two, all the teachers hate me, ..."

"Oh! that's no reason. Come on, you have to go to school!"
"Give me two good reasons WHY I should go to school?"

"One, you are FIFTY-TWO years old. Two, you are the PRINCIPAL of the school."

So I want to offer thanks and praise to the teachers I have known in my life, there have been many. Yes the ones from school days, but also the many who have taught me many lessons throughout my life.

There are teachers all around us, as there has been throughout human history. Some have specific names such as masters, gurus, crones, rabbis, elders, sages, priests, sheikhs, even ministers and they have played vital roles in revealing spiritual truths. They have done so both directly and or indirectly through parables, koans, stories, sermons and personal example and they have recommended methods that can lead us to enhance our spiritual lives and therefore open us up to everything and that which is more than everything and yet can be found in everything. Sometimes we need such people to get us started on our journey.

That said we can learn just as much from the ordinary people in our lives, the ones who encourage to give life a full go. You see everyone and everything in life can and is a teacher, even seemingly negative and painful experiences, if we remain open to them. As I look back at my own life I reckon I have learnt more from suffering than joy, from getting things wrong rather than getting them right for these experiences have humbled me and therefore opened me up to more than I could ever have even begun to imagine.

Rabbi Jesus is one of the great examples, maybe the greatest of simply teaching what it means to live in and by love. He taught in the fine Jewish rabbinical tradition, but he did so in unorthodox ways. He had the courage to break the rules of form and he put the people first, before the rules. This seems harder for teachers to do today. A classic example of this was in the healing of the crippled woman on the Sabbath. He was criticised for healing on this holy day of rest, but taught through his example that compassion out trumped societal rules, he lived, taught and died by the rule of love.

The example I see from the great sages is that the “way” that they speak of is truly about love, good teachers teach truly from the heart. The real lessons of living that matter the most is about teaching others to live by heart. This takes courage, which as I have taught many times is rooted in the French word for heart. As Parker J. Palmer has highlighted “Good teaching requires courage—the courage to explore one’s ignorance as well as insight, to yield some control in order to empower the group, to evoke other people’s lives as well as reveal one’s own.”

Good teachers help us to fully engage with life and encourage us to overcome the fears that can hold us back from living the lives we were born to live. It’s not about finding ways to rise above life but to fully engage with life, in its messiness and its rough and tumble. Again as Palmer has highlighted “Fear, not ignorance, is the great enemy of education. Fear is what gives ignorance its power.”

The great sages, the great teachers lived in the mess and muck and life, in the rough and tumble, they did not live apart. Those who have taught me how to bring my spirit alive have shown me the same. They were simple ordinary people and yet they were the professors of the heart. Again to quote Palmer:

“In is original meaning, a “professor” was not someone with esoteric knowledge and technique. Instead, the word referred to a person able to make a profession of faith in the midst of a dangerous world. All good teachers, I believe, have access to this confidence. It comes not from the ego but from a soul-deep sense of being at home in the world despite its dangers. This is the authority by which good teachers teach. This is the gift they pass on to their students. Only when we take heart as professors can we “give heart” to our students—and that, finally, is what good teaching is all about.

I have known some great teachers in my life; my life has taught me many lessons. Sadly though I have forgotten far more than I ever thought I could have known in my life. This is why I have to keep on learning and re-learning these life lessons, as I discovered during the summer at the speed awareness course.

Life and the people we share our lives with have so much to teach us. All we have to do and be is awake, to keep our hearts open enough to be fully awake.

Life is the greatest teacher of them all and we as a part of life can teach just by our presence in this world. People have taught me many things, in so many ways without ever really realising it. I have often only realised those lessons many years later. Lessons I have tried to pass on to others.

You don’t have to be academically inclined to be a true teacher, just a professor of the heart. The best lessons in my life have come from ordinary people living in the mess and much of life. One of my greatest teachers was an ordinary man, from Oldham of all places, who taught me , amongst many other things, how to listen. This all began by practising and noticing when I wasn’t listening, especially when others were talking. He taught me to observe when my mind wandered off or to notice when I was listening how much of my time was spent on working out what “brilliant” response I was going to make, in an attempt to refute what the other person was saying. He taught me that when we are listening to another we are extending ourselves to that person, we are giving them a gift; a gift that we can both share in. In making space for the other, we create a sacred space, we make space for God and we get a taste of heaven.

This truly opened me up to people in a way I had never been before; it brought me alive to life in ways I had never been before. Now of course not all the great sages come from Oldham. Those of ancient times taught similar lessons to this ordinary man. That said I am not sure that I could have accessed what they taught all those years. It required simple language from an ordinary man. He spoke the language of the heart and I was prepared to listen. I learnt a valuable lesson that day; I learnt that the language of the heart is universal, it can break down any barrier. Those simple words opened me to experiences I never knew were possible. Those experiences opened my senses, particularly my ears, I finally had ears that could hear and I began to finally hear so much more than mere words. The ears of my heart were opened and as a result I began to live by the heart and found the courage to truly be.

Everything, all life, can be our teacher if we are open to it. If we have ears that can hear, if all our senses are awake to everything and that something or perhaps nothing that is are the core of everything and yet beyond everything.

We can all become professors of the heart.

Dread: “A ship in the harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.”

The other morning I was walking to my car, about to set off, when I saw a woman getting out of hers about to go into the large school room, for an exercise class. I looked at her, nodded, smiled and said hello. She had a terrified look on her face and then she began to speak. She said “Every week I come here and when I set off I do not know why I am coming.” She continued “Every week I have this horrendous feeling of dread in my stomach, I almost feel sick with fear” “And yet every week once I get started I really enjoy it and feel so much better afterwards.” We spoke for a few minutes about, fear anxiety and faith and then some of the other women arrived for the class, so I left and went about my business. It was interesting to note that although she dreaded coming every week, she was still the first to arrive.

Anyway I drove off and began ruminating about Dread! Like you do!

Fear comes in many forms. Fright is a vital part of our human make up, we really need it. It points to danger etc, it’s a warning signal. There are though other forms of fear which are not useful at all. Perhaps the most debilitating is dread.

Dread is a crippling form of anxiety. It is fed by our desire to control what is beyond our control, the world in which we live. We want to be safe, we want to be secure, but is this realistic? Is life really about being safe and secure? I am not convinced that it is. Sadly, it would appear, when some folk begin to see this reality they can become crippled by the dread of life itself.

Dread is the ultimate in negativity. It can make everything appear bleak. It dulls the senses, turns colours into shades of grey and takes all the taste out of life. It leads to folk projecting all their anxiety and worry onto everything that they do in life and thus takes the very life out of living. It leads to misery.

At it’s worse dread can lead to us into a pit of depression. It traps us with the very things that we believe protect us from the dangers that we see in life. As a result we go deeper into ourselves, until we become lost and trapped within our own black hole. It can be very difficult to find our way out of this black hole. We certainly can’t just dig ourselves out.

I am of course familiar with dread, it did in days gone by rule much of my life. From a young age it would often come over me on Sunday afternoons and evenings, usually when Bullseye was on or Surprise Surprise, I think that’s why I preferred to out of the house, so as to deny the reality of returning to school. It was the same in my late teens and twenties, but by then alcohol had become a solution to that hideous feeling in my stomach and everything else for that matter. I really didn’t enjoy having to conform to reality. I am of course a much different man today. I have discovered the gift of reality, I know that this is where the joy of living is to be found.

A friend of mine recently posted this on Facebook:

“A ship in the harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.”

Of course this isn’t entirely true, ships aren’t always safe in the harbour. Think about the destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour. That said I did get her point. By living safely in what we know, the old familiar we may well remain safe, but that really isn’t what life is about. It’s about living, it’s about taking risks, it’s about being out of this state of control from time to time. We cannot protect ourselves from life’s dangers, from suffering. In fact by even trying to do so we end up suffering from something far worse “The suffering within the suffering”, we end up not living at all, we stagnate, we lose everything that makes us human, we do not make best use of the gifts we have been given. What a waste! Dread can be soul destroying and life taking. It disconnects us from life itself.

Grief can often lead to dread, whether through the loss of a loved one or through repeated failure or rejection in life. These losses, these defeats can lead us to believe that we will never know joy again. As Forrest Church highlights Dread combines the fear of death with the fear of life. It makes us fully aware of the fragility of life, but  without  an appreciation of its preciousness. Therefore the risk required to find colour and flavour in life is seen as hopeless. We say “why take any chance”; we say  “nothing ventured, nothing lost”; we say “Why bother?” We withdraw from life, retreat into ourselves until it all looks grey and bleak again. We lose our taste for life. We live disconnected lives.

So what’s the solution? Well for me it’s quite simply to have a little faith; to not allow that feeling in your stomach to rule. The lady I met outside the large school room seemed to have it, in spite of her fear, she just needs to learn how not to spoil her morning before arriving at the class. But does this truly deal with the causes of dread? No not really, it only offers a temporary solution to the immediate difficulty. It deals with anxiety one dread at a time, but it doesn’t fully solve the real problem. What about the big picture?

Well it won’t surprise my regular readers to hear that I believe Forrest Church offers a solution.

He said:

"...When suffering overwhelms hope, as it sometimes will, life’s burden feels too heavy for us to shoulder; it may in fact be too heavy to shoulder on our own. We must then turn to others and to God for strength. And for encouragement. Encouraged, we once again take heart. In the face of dread’s most persuasive argument, mustering the courage to act, love, and be, we answer fear’s no with a saving yes”

We are not alone and we do not need to try and face life alone. By reaching beyond ourselves we can find the courage to live and to be all that we are able to be. If we do we will see life in all its colour and taste it in all its flavour. Sometimes that will mean we will get hurt and even seemingly fail, but at least we will be fully alive. We will be connected to life itself.

So yes a ship is seemingly safe if left in the harbour, but it really isn’t what they are made for.