Teaching Notes
Monday, April 10th, 2006The satsang that took place in Chicago this weekend was the first time I have done any formal teaching since last spring when I decided to take a break. Teaching has been on my mind, and I am also aware that some readers of Living Tantra are teachers. So here are some thoughts, from a Tantrik perspective, on being a teacher.
Teaching is energy. Taking a broad View, teaching is a world capacity. The teaching capacity, or Guru tattva, doesn’t belong to anyone; it’s part of the fabric of reality. But it is more or less apparent in different people.
From the View of those individuals who do become teachers, clearly there are some teachers for whom teaching is a special way of anesthetizing against fear of openness. Even within friendships, we find many people who take up the role of the teacher or mentor. There is nothing limiting about this per se, except when the flip side is fear of vulnerability and the unknowable.
Teachers often express the View that teaching is necessary to their own growth. Teaching is part of their sadhana. Another motivation is simply to be of use.
Beyond any of these motivations is the natural flow of wisdom pulling us inexorably toward Self-realization. Every now and then, a teacher appears who is a nearly transparent conduit for this natural flow.
Most of us are a mixture of the desire for control, the desire for our own realization, and the desire to be of use to others. Sometimes a few of us get a little transparent. Even a little transparency, that is total relaxation appearing in the form of teacher or Guru, goes a long way.
Ruthless self-reflection leading to clarity about our own motivations is paramount. We don’t necessarily need to try to antidote or fix the mix of motivations we discover in ourselves, but allowing ourselves to clearly see our real condition is the foundation of all authentic teaching, and all authenticity period.
Most of us will always have blind spots, but we must make a tremendous effort to come out from the fog of self-delusion and fantasy. Teachers who know their own limitations and are unembarrassed by them reflect an aspect of relaxation to students because of these limitations, not in spite of them.
It is often said that ideally teachers should not need their students. But, again, most of us are a mixed bag. To the extent that we are attached to our students out of fear, as adjuncts to our own sadhana, or even for the lofty goal of “being of use,” some of the energy that we put out will never get to the students. There will not be a full transmission.
Please note that in the natural course of things, the student-teacher situation does teach the teacher and does have use-value. What we are talking about here is attachment based on a teacher’s fixed concepts and egoic needs.
Teachers with strong needs for their students, or the teaching situation, sometimes bind students to themselves by generating an intense atmosphere. They create a kind of intensity addiction in their students. Students are all too willing to enter into the game. It seems like a lot of energy is being given to students, but actually, it is an impoverished situation.
For those who are not so caught up in extremes, clear self-awareness, humor, and self-irony are key. With these “tools,” when the urge to manipulate students, or suck energy out of students arises, we will be able to acknowledge this and laugh at ourselves and the universe. We can “express” the energy in this way without perpetrating these behaviors against others.
The desire to be of use can be a subtle deceiver. We can notice the pollutants in the sweet flow of nourishment to our students, pollutants such as desiring to be of use to particular students and desiring our students to show signs of progress so we can feel better about them and ourselves.
When we have relaxed more deeply, we enter into a more amorphous, fluid state in which the way is not so measurable. Even if we are leaders, we experience ourselves as followers. Our daily experience is more that of being used, rather than being of use in an individualistic sense. Chogyam Trungpa calls this a state of “environmental generosity.” We become available to being used by a situation that is larger than individual students, although it surely includes them. In fact, this is always our real condition, but we can’t understand this until we drop the activities of measuring ourselves and others.
My experience teaching in nursing and retirement homes made this beautifully apparent to me. A few of the students are perfectly alert, but most are in various states of physical and mental deterioration, including one or two who are sunk into near unconsciousness. There is simply no way to measure the impact of the yoga and meditation we do together. If I want to continue teaching this population, and I consider it a great blessing, I must simply make the offering, trust in the larger situation, and let go of measuring, preferentiality, and self back-patting. This situation is no different from any other teaching situation. It only literalizes the truth of all teaching.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t assist students to gain skill in various areas, or that we don’t share our understandings of the fruits of various practices so that students don’t get stuck. What it does mean is that we are always aware that the open potentiality of any situation is immeasurable, and ultimately unpredictable.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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