The teacher within us

When teaching is approached as a spiritual practice, students offer us teachings on a daily basis, they provide enough lessons to last a lifetime. This daily practice gives space for us to delve deeper. Our attention can include being more attuned with our current surroundings rather than only attempting to reach a specific destination or focussing on an end result. If our mindset is solely on achieving goals, we may lose the valuable learning opportunities the process offers us. So we should keep asking, what are the lessons this journey brings?

In the current educational setting there is a trend to focus on reaching national or state standards, school-wide benchmarks, grade-level curricular goals, or lesson objectives. In the frenzy to reach them, we may be justifiably proud of the laudable goals that are achieved, but we may also want to ask, at what expense? Is it at the expense of getting more out of touch with ourselves and others in the process? Is it at the expense of creating unnecessary stress? Information overload? And what about our sense of well being and that of our students? The kind of energy we put into the task itself is also the energy we are perpetuating in ourselves as well as what ultimately gets communicated, particularly to our students. In this increasingly frenetic world, it is vitally important to seek a sense of balance between our internal and external worlds. When students can be a source for our own inner growth, making us better people and better teachers, we help merge these worlds into one.

It is important to embrace each opportunity presented to us and trust that the process brings the lessons we need to learn. Rather than be overly focussed on the actual attainment of an ethical value or spiritual practice, it is important to see that our daily lives provide opportunities for us to revisit and nourish these values, such as compassion in ourselves. Our journeys may never have a final destination, but more than reaching a destiny, it is the journey itself that brings value and enriches our lives, if we can stop and listen. And it is in the listening that energies shift in subtle forms, transforming us along the way, and leading us to the next steps.

Excerpted from the writer’s recent book, ‘Teaching as a Spiritual Practice’