Ending a Teaching

All teachings end. Whether by graduation or circumstance or death, all teaching relationships, no matter how beneficial or profound, come to a close. But we are not so good at endings. It is a rare person who enjoys endings, who looks for them and seeks to perform them gracefully and fruitfully. Instead we ignore them, discount them, downplay them.

A teacher has great power to demonstrate good endings, to give the student a way to transition from one path to another, one level to another, one teacher to another or to no teacher. Even when the student is staying with the teacher, the teacher can help mark a place where one form of study ends and another begins, showing how things are ended well.

When a deep teaching is informal or unstructured in duration, it is rare to find a teacher deliberately ending the work at a useful place. More often such teachings end with life circumstance; someone moves away, loses interest, or there is a falling-out. It is rare indeed to hear a teacher say, “I think that we have done good work, and it is enough. Go do something else.”

For these and other reasons, it is sometimes the student who must end the relationship. One student I spoke with had found herself unable to function due to stresses with her teacher. Despite having gained a great deal from the work she had decided that it was time to end the relationship but was conflicted. The words of her teacher came back to her, making her doubt herself. Only when the cost was very great did she see ending as her best choice.

This can be hard for a student. The decision alone may be brutally difficult. Teachers are often able to evoke vulnerable and dependent feelings in their students, and if the teacher is reluctant to let the student leave, it can be difficult for the student to even consider this option.

Teachers, if your student cannot freely leave your teaching, they also cannot freely stay with your teaching. While there are times when the student’s learning is best served by a sense of needing to stay, there are important times when the teaching will suffer if the student does not feel free to leave.

From the teacher’s point of view, the work here is to enable the student to leave in a good way, and then, perhaps, if appropriate, also allow them to stay. Teach your student to think about what it means to end things, to move forward, to graduate, to grow beyond you and your teachings.

From the student’s point of view, the work here is to understand that the teacher is a means to a path, perhaps a doorway, and not the path itself nor the room beyond. The student may have come to trust the teacher, rely on them for direction, clarity, comfort, transformation, even deep spiritual bliss. A sense of rightness and belonging is often found in such relationships. These are hard things to give up.

The excellent teacher will have taught the student that the genesis of such profound experiences is not in the teacher. They will have taught the student to practice finding these things on their own, and will make the ending a positive and beneficial process, whether they leave the door open for the student to return or not.

My offered practice for students and teachers both: consider your most profound and powerful current teacher-student relationship. Reflect on ending it, and what it would take to do that gracefully and with beneficial outcome for all. What might you do now to lay the foundation for that ending?