This is the second of my interviews with teachers.
T. Thorn Coyle is a spiritual and magical arts teacher. She has published two books: Kissing the Limitless and Evolutionary Witchcraft. In this interview we explore her views on teaching and mastery. Thorn tells me why it is essential that teachers also continue to be students.
Asher Bey: Thorn, hello. Please tell us a bit about your teaching.
Thorn Coyle: My teaching, while based in the magical and esoteric arts, is at root about full human integration, and coming into wholeness with ourselves, the earth, and the cosmos. This requires a lot of diligent practice, self-observation, and listening.
I teach in person all over the world via weekend workshops and in classes with ongoing, dedicated students and practitioners. These happen in many places throughout the US, in Brazil, Germany, England, Australia, and Tasmania as well as on line.
My teaching is a bit unusual in that, rather than teaching something concrete such as dance, martial arts, or chemistry, I’m “teaching” spiritual practice and steps toward spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional growth and integration.
AB: I notice you quote “teaching”? Why?
TC: Teaching spiritual practice feels different than teaching someone how to frame a wall, or do an algebraic equation, or pass on some theories on history. It can include elements of all of these, in that full attention will help the wall come together properly, and curiosity helps with algebra, and larger intellectual context helps with history. Attention, curiosity, and context can help any learning endeavor, and are key to deepening our spiritual practice, our self awareness, and our overall mental, physical, emotional, and energetic health. What I am mostly offering is a way for students to see themselves more fully and find ways to be more effective and to uncover their deeper work.
AB: How long have you been teaching this material?
TC: Just under twenty years. In retrospect, I likely began teaching too soon. I started out teaching the basics of magical practice, and as it was, I was teaching while only one or two steps ahead of the people sitting in small groups in someone’s living room.
AB: In our culture there is a belief that says it is best to learn from a master of the art, but I am far from convinced. I see it as an
advantage to the student when the teacher is close in experience. What are your thoughts on this?
TC: What you are pointing to here, I think, is that the teacher must have a fresh relationship with the material so that she is not too abstract and sophisticated. Passing on a skill that one has recently mastered is a great way to teach. In my work, however, there are some things that require more depth, greater digestion, and further integration on my part. Given my subject matter – spiritual growth and exploration – more years of refining myself would have stabilized what I was transmitting.
AB: How so?
TC: I often am called upon to answer the question three layers below the question my students are asking. I want to show them the larger and deeper context for their question so they don’t get trapped on the hamster wheel of the surface concern.
However, what is important to me about your observation is that I need to be struggling with and exploring things in a way that is similar to my student’s struggles and explorations. I need to be as immersed in a learning process as they are, otherwise my teaching is too distant. This is why it is important for me to seek out teaching and to have a good group of peers whom I bounce things off of.
AB: Who do you consider your peers?
TC: They are family and friends, people I work on creative projects with, people who teach me, push me, and hold me accountable. I seek out more formal teaching as well. I encourage the same from people who study with me, and I tell them “Beware the teacher who only has students” because I discovered that for myself the hard way!
AB: Good point. I have observed that many teachers find it uncomfortable to be students after having established themselves as teachers.
TC: Part of that is embedded in concepts of identity and authority. It is very important to challenge anything that keeps us brittle, such as not wanting to be placed in a student role. But when we see our students struggling, sometimes over and over with the same issue or concept, we have to remember what it is to be confronted with something in this way. This also helps us to learn from our students.
AB: So you yourself yourself are still a student. Can you tell me about your experiences being a student?
TC: I recently attended a workshop with an 81 year old who works in my field and yet teaches completely different material. I set myself the task at the beginning of the class to try to listen on at least three levels at all times: intellectual, emotional, and energetic. I got a chance to observe when various parts of my personality responded to something, to see how my energy and physical presence wanted to ebb and flow, and to notice when some deeper parts of self were opening to teaching.
This combined to show me that I had failed to set time aside to explore the deeper ramifications of some of the spiritual technologies that I myself had developed! I had reached a certain place and part of me had decided “good enough.” That stunts the learning process.
We all need to be pushed, and challenged, and held accountable. It keeps the work fresh, and our spirits, bodies, and minds, supple.
AB: I have a theory that if we are too near the student in experience we cannot guide, too far ahead and we have no compassion for their struggle. What do you think?
TC: There is the trope of the brilliant physicist who cannot explain the simplest thing to anyone. If I forget what it is to work as hard as my students, it can make it too hard to teach them well. They can start to think “that is just her. It is easy for her.” There needs to be away to transmit that things do get easier, and the struggle for knowledge is both interesting and worth it, but also that I continue to seek out that dissonance that teaches even in the midst of my flow. The rocks in the river form interesting patterns when we can notice their shapes, yet not fight with them too hard. We can remain in the current even while working with our obstructions.
AB: Do you see it as our work to put rocks in the student’s flow if it is too smooth, or perhaps take some away if it is too rocky? To make the river seem survivable? I have watched teachers who find a way to make the work accessible while still keeping the distant horizon in view. Perhaps if the student knows how much there is in front of them, they would become discouraged and turn away. What do you think?
TC: Generally life provides the obstacles we need, and all a teacher has to do is point out the ways we are avoiding or fighting with the rocks, and remind us again of the flow. I’ve had teachers who have waited until an opportune moment to point something out to me that, had they tried to transmit it six months previous, would not have penetrated at all. In that moment, they were skillful enough to show me something that opened up whole new vistas of learning for me. I’ve also seen teachers try to do this, and fail. There is something about the energy between teacher and student – the intercourse of learning – that allows for these moments. There can be a tendency to want to give people as much as we have, and sometimes I have to back off from that, and try to transmit just one simple thing.
AB: As I see it, this is one of the hardest and yet most crucial tasks for the teacher: to find the one thing the student most needs to hear – and then be silent.
TC: Yes. My immediate goal is to try to pass on one thing that a person will find useful in his life. My longer term project is to provide enough reminders and support for self-observation and practice that a person will lead herself to the stage that can be called “self-possession”. I write about this in “Kissing the Limitless”.
AB: How do you define self-possession?
TC: Self-possession is a stage of integration and full human health where we have consistency and effectiveness in our lives, rather than being buffeted about willy nilly by each stray thought, emotion, advertising or news campaign. I cannot teach this longer term project, not really. All I can do is offer some suggestions, give support, and point each person on their way.
AB: I’m interested in how you point these students on their way. Can you say more about that process?
TC: We are attempting to come into alignment with ourselves – body, heart, mind, and soul – and with our lives. Students are encouraged to establish a base of practice and theory and to seek out other teachings once they have this context. I ask them what perspectives their own life experiences and training give them, and ask them to offer these to the group. We observe our habits, delve into family taboos, and try to get a sense of what ideas or emotional patterns run our lives. I use as one example my impatience as something that has come to teach me a lot, once I finally began to pay attention to it, and enter into active relationship with it.
AB: What do you mean by an active relationship?
TC: An active relationship requires us to first notice and then observe, how we think, what our emotional responses are, what we eat, how we exercise – that sort of thing. It requires the development of actual presence with – rather than living in suppositions about – who we are and what task or information is in front of us. Active relationship can work with any type of learning: I want to be fully present whether learning a dance move, using a hammer, or looking at myself.
AB: Paying attention to ourselves so that we can better see the world around us?
TC: Yes. Another way of putting it is that the Mystery cannot be taught, only revealed. People must find their own way to relate to the work and figure out their process of understanding. A good teacher asks the right questions and makes statements at appropriate times, along with trying to show where the answers may lay, or what the techniques are to get there. The teacher sets up a resonance with the student, and the teachings is transmitted via that connection, more so than via any information supplied. Passing along information is not teaching.
I am not, for example, trying to teach the correct way to meditate, though we use meditation as a tool. Rather I am setting tasks, opening conversations, and assisting energies that will hopefully enable each person to wake up to herself and to find his own strength and centeredness. When I remember my own strength and centeredness, I continue to learn too.
If you know a teacher you would like to see interviewed please contact me.
