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I once met a man who, years after leaving his teacher, returned to find his teacher struggling. His respect and affection for his teacher remained strong, as did his desire to retain his teacher’s good will. He was conflicted about what to do. Could he, he asked me, teach his own teacher?
Here is a truth of teaching: if you require the student’s good regard, your teaching is impeded. A teacher’s need for a student’s fondness, respect, or approval undermines deep teaching, relegating it to secondary status behind the social exchange.
Effective teaching does not preclude the teacher and student having a close connection. Emotional ties need not be deleterious to deep teaching, and may even enhance it. The obstacle is not the existence of these feelings but the teacher’s dependency on them.
Thus the challenge is for the teacher to allow these emotions to come or go and teach well regardless. But it is easy to think ourselves balanced, to think ourselves at ease with the student’s changing emotions, but to find that when we must truly risk the student’s good regard to best support their learning we are not quite as unconcerned as we thought.
It is challenging to cultivate a willingness to forgo the student’s good regard, especially when it is a foundation of the relationship, but the deeper your teachings, the more essential is this cultivation.
In this particular case, the man’s issue was not whether he would be able to teach his former teacher, an effort that might well require a subtle and indirect approach as well as his former teacher’s willing engagement, but the man’s intention to keep his teacher’s respect and fondness, a goal at odds with the needs of teaching. To teach his teacher, I told him, he must begin by releasing this intent.
I further suggested that it might be time to graduate from his teacher’s influence as a step toward his own ability to offer insights free of emotional bias.
As students, our teacher’s authority over us is a powerful social creation, but it is a creation, not an immutable truth. To fully take in what a teacher has to offer we must be able to move beyond their authority, good regard, and circle of influence. We must be able to graduate.
As teachers, whatever we are unwilling to risk in our relationship with the student restricts us from seeing them clearly and offering deep transformations. To the degree that we are afraid to lose a student, we handicap our teaching.
My offered practice: consider a student of whom you are both fond and proud. Imagine that they no longer respect nor like you but that they remain your student. Can you keep your teaching vital? Can you see this path?
It is essential for the seeker to ask themselves “what do you want?” as deeply as possible. To know what you want most dearly gives you the best chance of obtaining it. As you walk through the world and experience each thing, ask yourself: does this get me closer?
When I talk about deep teaching, the first question that often arises is, “Will it take me where I want to go?” To which the response must be: “Where do you want to go?”
This is far from trivial. It is hard to answer honestly, because we do not know how. We are conditioned to frame such questions in terms of what we expect ourselves to want, what our culture tells us to want, what we believe is possible to get. This is further tangled by our need to avoid what we fear. Identifying our own true and profound desire is both complicated and unlikely, but we must discover what we truely seek if we are to have a chance of finding it.
The next question that arises about deep teaching is this: is it dangerous?
Of course it is. Any teaching from which you learn will change you. We tend believe that what we can gain from a deep teaching is like clothes, something we can put on without having to become someone else. But this is not how it works. Learning changes us, whether slowly or quickly. And deep learning changes us profoundly. It is dangerous to who we are when we begin.
To those of you considering deep teaching, who have some clarity on what it is you truly seek, I pose this question: is what you want most dearly worth changing who you are to get it?
To teachers who hope to move students this profoundly, I pose this question: is what you are teaching so important that it is worth changing who you are to teach it? It is not only the student who must face such transformation. As always, the teacher must also walk the path.
The active student is one who drives their own learning. What teacher would not want such a student?
Many teachers, as it turns out. It is upsetting to our control and order to face a student who asks hard questions and challenges us. Our own fears and insecurities lead us to undercut the very actions that might create such a student.
For the teacher it is easy to subtly dimish student agency. All we need do is fail to help the student behave in powerful, self-directed ways. This is rarely is intentional or considered and usually we do not see what we are doing. We also do not see what the student is doing, or what they need.
The ornate and intricate tapestry that is the student is laid out before us, but to see it clearly we must be able to view it without the bias and filters of our own insecurities.
When a student challenges us, leaves us, or passes us, we do not always react well. To nurture the active student, we must ourselves desire a student so capable and engaged that we become increasingly redundant. How might we best address our own internal barriers to this? First by accepting this paradox of teaching: the excellent teacher is at once both essential and irrelevant. In order to open the way for the active student to walk the path without our help we must learn to understand our teaching role in both ways.
The next step is to retrain the student’s motivational frame, to restructure their view of the teacher as gatekeeper. But the first step in creating a self-directed and active student is to create a teacher who wants one.
My offered practice: consider a student for whom you have great hopes. Imagine that they no longer need you. Imagine that another teaches them more effectively. Imagine that you realize they are better off without you. Discover without judgment or meddling any thoughts or motivations this may bring. Learn to see these things in yourself, like birds flying; be aware of them, but also see the sky beyond.
In Teachers as Predators I begin to explore how teachers make powerful social predators. I encourage teachers to consider their own predatory urges, both because what we cannot imagine takes us most by surprise and what we refuse to see controls us most effectively.
Aviv asks me about the step following such self-inquiry. What happens when these find these urges within, discovering a desire to gain something from a student without regard to the student’s well-being? What next? Aviv mentions shame, will-power, and his reflection on what he really wants.
Shame and will-power are typical tools to keep student and teacher safe from the teacher’s greater power. But as we become more sophisticated in our self-inquiry, we can use methods more precise than the hammer of shame and the steam-roller of will. A finer tool is an unbiased examination of our internal constructions, both dark and light, grey and deeper grey.
To look within means we may see. Some of us fear that if we see something we will no longer be able to deny it exists, confusing desire and action. But examining our motivations does not force us to lose control or disregard the student’s best interest. We are not that simple.
Consider the committed predator; this one views others as sustenance to consume rather than entities to nurture. Do you feel shame or guilt when you eat a hamburger? A fish stick? An apple? An almond? At what point does the object of your desire simply become something to eat?
Imagine feeling this way about your student. How does this differ from you how you do feel? In such inquiry lies the insights that help us teach from understanding rather than fear.
I am painting a black and white picture, but our motivations are rarely so simple or uncluttered. Most teachers want what is best for their student while at the same time wanting what they want. To address such potentially conflicting drives, we must learn to see ourselves clearly so we can choose actions rather than being controlled by fears and denials.
A ruthless and unbiased examination of our internal motivations is critical to our teaching work. It is not what we desire or fear that damns us to our personal hells. It is what we refuse to see.
Lastly, this: we teach what we believe to be true, and we teach around what we refuse to see. What do we hide from ourselves, and how are we teaching it to our students?
In this post, Musha Shugyô divides teachers into three types: Sage, Seller, and Bard. I find this distinction useful.
A teacher may know the material deeply, may be able to communicate it well, or may be able to present it compellingly. Few teachers can do all three.
We as students may not know which of the three we are dealing with. It matters, but perhaps not the way we think.
And as teachers? We do not know how foreign are the lands to which we have never travelled.
The Seller and the Bard in Shugyô’s narrative have not been to the lands they think they have, where the Sage has lived, but they may well be able to offer the student a clearer view of this foreign land than can the Sage.
Students believe they want to learn from experts, from those who come from these foreign lands, but this is not so. They want to be taught by those who can best bridge the gap between the Sage’s experience and their current context, and that is not always the Sage.
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