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I’ve been really enjoying all the teaching I’ve been doing. Probably teaching qi gong is my favourite. But I am also loving teaching the Leadership for Change course at Antioch University. Not really the intellectual stuff, though that can be fun too. It is where I can weave practice and honesty and authenticity and life experience together and offer these in a way that seems to resonate and even help a few people; this is what I am enjoying most about being in the teacher role. Honestly though – it feels more like just being a friend, maybe a bit of a mentor. Much less (if at all) standard professorial stuff.
Last night I had one of those good moments – alignment/happiness. I had given a small lecture and it went well enough. Then we were discussing it in class, kind of open seminar style. The talk I had given was from an intensely political and quite complex (in terms of the policy and partisan political and interest group dynamics interwoven at the international, national, regional and local levels) chapter of my life, before I encountered the Dharma or began to practice. I was talking about how – at that time – I had no real awareness. How my thoughts and feelings completely governed me. How I had little real space in which to reflect and see clearly (call it mindfulness, or choiceless awareness or whatever this is for you). And then I shared a bit about Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) talking about activism and how many activists are fueled by the hot energy of anger. And how whenever we are coming from anger we are not lucid. Cannot be lucid. That the energy of anger cannot be in the same place as the energy of lucidity (Buddhist physics). Of stability. Clarity. Equanimity.
People seemed to get that (the majority of the graduate students in the class are following the advocacy stream in the Environmental Studies department) and they were reflecting on their own experiences and what they have seen in the world of activism.
Right at the end of the class a young woman offered the closing comment for the evening. She thanked me for helping her to what she called a really important Aha moment for her. Where she realized that all of the anger that has been motivating her to address and rectify so many injustices and brutalities and tragedies in the world – that this anger she often feels so powerfully….that this is just an expression of the huge love in her. That, in fact, she is moved first and foremost by love. And that she needs/wants to put energy into cultivating both this awareness and also the energy of love itself.
At this point I just couldn’t help it and I began to smile. And I remembered my own quite late awareness of the same thing in my life of politics and activism and then of spiritual practice, awareness dawning….love growing…..reaching up and through and around all the other stuff. Reaching for the light (not always so easy!).
The young woman talked about how she had been thinking of quitting school. Because she thought she would be feeling more empowered and focused as she pursued her studies and honed tools for how to best understand complex realities and then change them. Instead she had just been feeling anger and confusion and overwhelm. But now she was seeing through the lens of love and it was starting to make sense.
Anyway. It was really lovely. I spoke with her after the class and we’ll try and drink some tea together some time soon. To me there is nothing more beautiful than to be present for someone’s awakening experience. They (awakening experiences) usually have some messy pieces to them (mine did and still does for sure!) – and they are wonderfully alive. This is my very favourite kind of work; helping to create good conditions for awakening and then being present to support the process, wherever it might lead.
The photo is from Santa Fe a couple weeks ago – late afternoon light and a magic little Buddha garden.
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