Guru's Handbook

Fear lies atop treasure worth digging for

When you bury your fears, anything that touches those fears is also hidden from you or blurred. And what you can’t see, you can’t teach.

Deny your fears and you will also be unable to teach your students about fear itself.

If you look for your fears, [...]

For every rule an exception For every teacher a worthy student you cannot teach

If you teach long enough, a talented and worthy student will come before you, and for some reason you will be unable to teach them.

If you are a diligent teacher, you will try many methods to teach this student. [...]

Lay a brick path for your students Leave gaps

When you are first given a student, you will want to establish some basic terms and a framework for your teaching. It is easy to believe that this foundation can be laid thoroughly.

It can’t. And indeed, you should make it a point to leave [...]

A hot fury burns within you deny it and it controls you give into it and it controls you Can you teach this?

Sooner or later you will become angry. Your student will do something that is out of line, violate an important rule. Perhaps they will even break your trust. You may feel [...]

A clue is a seed, a shard of perspective. A little thing that may, with luck and light, allow new connections to form in the mind of the student. Once grasped, the rest is details: constants and laws and dates and put that foot here and turn like this.

Making clues is hard work. [...]

If you teach success also teach failure They are both essential to flight

You teach your student to succeed. Of course. And to succeed, they must take risks, yes?

And, of course, when you risk you can fail.

Do you teach your students how to fail, how to fall, and how to survive such [...]

As I wrote in “Faith and Doubt”, allowing and teaching a student to doubt can help deepen the student’s understanding of the material.

Doubt and resistance are related. I would like to discuss how they are connected and how a teacher might approach such responses when they arise in the student.

There is not [...]

I have heard it said: when the student is ready the teacher will appear

I have observed this: when the teacher is ready the teacher will appear

You’re a teacher when you teach.

At some point along your path, someone with authority may tell you you’re a teacher.

Or perhaps not.

If you are [...]

I have heard it said that youth is wasted on the young. I am of an age that I understand this saying better than I used to.

And yet, I also remember hearing this for the first time as a child. I was mystified. Had these adults really forgotten how unpleasant being young and [...]

You know the ground upon which the student treads because your feet left it only yesterday Look back with compassion

Now and then you will find that your student is facing some challenge that you yourself have recently faced. It is easy to wonder if you, still so close to the matter, are qualified [...]