THE GREAT WORK
Happiness is the great work,
Though every heart must first become
A student.

-Hafiz (Ladinsky, p.74, 1999)

Reading The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. So why do I feel grumpy? I used to finish a book of this genre feeling excited and thinking that I’d really learned something new. What annoyed me during my reading of this book was lack of guidance about how to create the profound experiences detailed by the authors. Failure to describe the process is a major omission. Authors contributing to this work include Huston Smith, Parker Palmer, the Dalai Lama, Bell Hooks, and Joan Halifax – I know that they know something substantial that they are not telling me…

How do we move from inspiration to action? Philosophy professor, Daniel Vokey (2001) describes a core element of Buddhist practice:

In educational environments, there is a need for a pathway between inspiration and the lived experiences of both educator and student.

Here is a personal story that moves from difficulty to inspiration to lived experience. I had a student that was both very defensive and aggressive in his participation in an adult class of twenty. The defensiveness manifested as an inability to take anything that he perceived as criticism and the aggressiveness showed itself through over involvement in classroom discussion. In meditation I held him in my consciousness as if he were sitting in front of me and focused on him in a very deep way. I heard his words and saw him in great detail in his physical form, behavior, and feelings. I went through a number of imaginary exchanges with him based on my classroom experience. I then shifted and identified myself with him. I felt myself as this person. I felt nervous and in need of attention. That day I received an email from another student expressing her concerns about this man and his behavior. I wrote back and said that while it was not right for me to comment on this person, I did feel that if a member of any group was seen as a problem then the group must take it on and look at how it was supporting what was happening, how it was not owning its part, and how it was not supporting and/or including this person who was on the margin. My meditation in combination with the email contact was the inspirational ‘moment’ for me. I went to class the next day and talked about roles in communities. I spoke about how to support everyone, including the idea that those who are seen as troubling always feel disconnected and outside of the group. I said that every group has members who talk a lot and others who hardly speak at all. Our job as a community is to support each person and each part of each person. I said that this does not mean being passive and allowing all behavior. I said that it is possible to speak to persons who ‘talk too much’ and those who ‘speak too little’ in ways that were relational and supportive, no matter how tough the message.

The student in question spoke up after I had finished and talked about how he always felt nervous in groups and that his way of coping was to be over involved. He asked for support in the form of having others give him a signal in a “nice” way if he was going overboard. The student who sent me the email made a point of speaking to this man in the group. She gave him some feedback and talked about her own nervousness about speaking out. A nice connection occurred between them and this was enhanced by the fact that it took place in the class. This was a community developing experience as well as a personal growth experience for me and for both students.  The journey from experience in class into my meditation and back into the classroom was significant and meaningful.

The words ‘community’ and ‘education’ are in close proximity in a number of these essays. The authors all have a strong conception of educational community–a school setting that addresses both the human connections and the academic dimensions. As a counselling-therapist in private practice, workshop leader, and community college instructor, I have worked at developing communities within educational and therapeutic contexts. I have described (Cohen, 2002a) the requirement of inclusion of the human element in classrooms. Facilitating the interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions in classrooms supports learning about community, self in community, and creates a learning environment that facilitates optimal curriculum access for learners. “This requires…skills of facilitation, understanding of group dynamics and processes, and the acknowledgment and use of the leadership/mentorship aspect of the educator’s role (p. 16).” What I have endeavored to do, and what these educators do, is develop community on a personal and academic level.

As I read, I spotted a recurrent, endemic problem with ‘inspirational’ writing in education. This is the embedded ‘shoulds;’ (e.g., you should trust your intuition, be yourself, nurture a sense of awe and wonder in students, etc.). I love these ideas and I am increasingly dissatisfied with the consistent failure by authors to describe them as processes. Saying that these particular ideas are a better alternative is not sufficient. There are ‘good’ arguments for the ‘shoulds’ that the above ‘shoulds’ are meant to supplant (e.g., students need more discipline, more of the basics, more testing, etc.). This polarized debate is familiar, at times stimulating, and in the end, changes little. What is missing is a process orientation that recognizes that these polarized ideas are actually characteristics of different developmental stages in classroom communities and/or tensions on a continuum to be lived in and in between.

And then, unexpectedly, I came to a ‘stop,’ as is described by Heesoon Bai (2003) in the current issue of Educational Insights. “All disciplining involves stopping what is out of control, putting it into balance by recovering a proper context and directing the flow between the context (the Ground of Being in our case) and the focus (p. 11).” I literally stopped, became conscious of my body, and felt a shift within myself. I experienced a transition to a metaphoric perspective. The poetic, the musical, the artistic, and the light that seeps through the cracks in the heart’s wall found me. I stopped looking for how to do ‘it.’ I realized that any translation to actual practice would have to occur in the alchemy of my unconscious, my intuition, and from the source of dreaming itself.

Also in this issue of Educational Insights, Alison Pryer (2003) writes,

The practice of a meditative art, such as ikebana, helps to cultivate an intuitive understanding of the fullness of emptiness, and a deep reverence for the interconnectedness of all things. This understanding gives rise to an experience of communion, communion being a sense of non-dualistic consciousness and participation in the world that nourishes one’s desire to act with love and compassion (p. 10).

This passage describes the transformation that I experienced while reading this book. I moved from disappointment about what is missing to appreciation for what is present and what is emerging. Pryer sketches the potential ‘route’ that metaphor and practice provide in the development of community and wisdom. She recommends the metaskills of ‘love’ and ‘compassion.’ Metaskills, a term defined by Amy Mindell (1995), are the feelings and attitudes that a person brings with them in the moment and are superordinate to any behaviors and/or verbal expressions.

From my new location, I was struck by Judith Simmer-Brown’s fabulous images in her article, Commitment and Openness: A Contemplative Approach to Pluralism.

Simmer-Brown describes a dakini as one who “appears in our everyday lives as the unexpected woman who speaks the truth to our opinionated, speedy minds” (p.106), and she goes on to describe an encounter with a dakini.

The dakini tells us that the wounding is to her-self, is self-inflicted; that the other is us; that it is the collective us who inflicts the wound on the other; and, most significantly, that when we look deeply into the wound, vast and unimagined possibilities, previously unseen, become visible, awaiting communion with the explorer.

As John Taylor Gatto suggests in his essay, Education and the Western Spiritual Tradition, that to see the dilemma clearly, the structures in consciousness within which the dilemma exists have to be deconstructed. He writes,

Del Prete (2002, p.165) quotes Thomas Merton (1979, p.4), “Learning to be oneself means…learning to die in order to live.” I would elaborate and say that learning to live and love involves the death of the self that interferes with the inherent capacity to live and love that exists within each person, and that ‘only’ needs to be liberated from its external and self-imposed incarceration. Liberation involves opening the gates of the inner asylum to allow innate capacities to emerge, thrive, and grow; capacities, when allowed to emerge unimpeded, that are a natural and positive energetic force. The question arises, how might I bring a metaphoric concept of wounding in relationship with other and of the potency of daydreaming to the deconstruction and rebuilding of educational communities?

If you are wondering about the transition from metaphoric experience to lived experience in educational community, try the following. Recall your own experiences of being in this state of reverie as a child. Was it allowed? Encouraged? Disrupted? Based on your recollection think about how connected or disconnected you felt to the environment within which you had your experience of reverie. To take this process a little further allow yourself to go into this state of reverie now. Can you go there? If not what happens? Think about the affects on anyone in a group experience if they have grown up in a circumstance where reverie was not allowed. If you can experience reverie what do you experience? Allow yourself to wonder how can you bring this into your community experiences? What do you imagine about connection while in your reverie? Individuals who are allowed their reverie tend to be more comfortable in relational experience and those who were not have the opposite tendency.

I am still in some conflict about this book. I appreciated the transformative shift that occurred within me and yet I am still longing for knowledge from these elders about the process dimensions that shadow the lines of these essays. Perhaps I can take some heart and hope from the words of Simone Weil (1951),

Read for metaphor and spirit, the method(s) may emerge from and for you.

I would love to know what you experience.

I invite you to contact me and share your thoughts and feelings.

I am hopeful.
I am hopeful.
When we ‘meet,’ I am hopeful.

References

Bai, H. (2003). The stop: the practice of reanimating the universe within and without. Educational Insights. Vol. 8(2)., www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights.

Cohen, A. (2002a). Educational Communities: Their Creation, Nurturance, and Sacred Nature. Vancouver, B.C. Life Force Publishing.

(2002b). Group to learn one-to-one process directed counselling skills. Submitted.
Special issue Training in groups. The Canadian journal of counselling. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria.

Ladinsky, D. (1999). The gift: poems by hafiz, the great sufi master. Toronto, ON: Penguin Compass.

Merton, T. J. (1979). Love and living. (N. Burton & P. Hart, Eds.) New York, NY.
Harcourt, Brace & Company in Del Prete, T. in Being what we are in Miller, J.P. & Nakagawa, Y. (Eds.) (2002) Nurturing our wholeness: perspectives on spirituality in education. Rutland, VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal.

Mindell, Amy (1995). Metaskills: the spiritual art of therapy. Tempe, AZ. New Falcon.

Prior, A. (2003) The way of the flower: meditations on a softhearted pedagogy. Educational Insights. Vol. 8(2)., www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights.

Vokey, Daniel. (2001). Moral discourse in a pluralistic world. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Weil, S. (1951). Waiting for God. New York, NY. G.P. Putnam’s Son’s.

The Responding Author

Avraham Cohen is attempting to become a human being. He also works in private practice as a counselling therapist, instructs in the Counselling Certificate Program at Vancouver Community College, and is a doctoral student in the Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction at UBC. He has a great interest in educational community, educational leadership, the inner life of the educator, inspirational collaboration, and the interaction and inter-being of all of things. His publications include The whole person meditation manual (2002), A small handbook about intimacy and relationship for individuals and couples (2001), and The Personal Potential Newsletter; all published by Life Force Publications.

Email: lifeforce@shaw.ca