Pedestals and Prisons (a work in progress)

This is part of a much longer chapter I am writing on what it is to be named a "spiritual" teacher and how the teachers who have had the greatest impact in my own life are those who have been navigating life, not avoiding it. It's a work in progress, but I figured it was time to share some of what has arisen. 

The trick with being a teacher in a spiritual tradition like Yoga is that your main job is to see those before you as whole, holy, and complete. Missing nothing. Lacking nothing. Neither deficient nor in excess.  And when you commit yourself to that work, then that is what you see and call forth in those before you who have named you “teacher.” But that also means you are going up against some of their most deeply entrenched stories (about themselves, about others, about the world) and fears. What is illuminated in the presence of a good teacher isn't just the empowering or the beautiful. We meet all our own light and darkness. We meet all that we think of as unlovable and unbearable--not just the stuff we want to share with the world. Because real presence requires we heal back into the original state, at times re-opening and draining old wounds along the way. Yet it is so easy to make what we feel or experience about the teacher vs our own process. It's tempting attribute our insights and awakenings to another, and it's equally easy (so so so easy) to place blame on another when we bump up against our less lovable or loving places. And when it gets hard--and it gets very, very hard when we begin to amend our old stories--we might want to hold someone else accountable for that internal tumult. We might give up and blame the tradition, the teacher, the method, the homework, the classmates, the commitment, the expectations. We often shame ourselves when it's hard, as though the struggle were evidence we are doing it wrong. Or not doing enough. A committed teacher is going to hold us in that space, too. Even as we rail and fidget and implode and explode. 

Sometimes we really appreciate that.
Sometimes we don't.

Part of the conflict is how we attribute too much to teachers, whilst simultaneously stripping them of their own humanity, evolution, or messiness. 

Some people want an idol. A model. An image. Someone to place on a pedestal and praise (or condemn) in order to divert the focus from the real task of looking inward. When we make it about another person's triumphs or failures, we implicitly hand over our own process of revelation and maturation. We ask them to carry the burden of our spiritual responsibility, focusing our attention on worshiping or measuring their performance of our ideals rather than attending to the perfection of our own inner practice. 

Whether fawning over someone as perfect or judging them for not being so (and the two are intimately and inextricably related), the result is the same: We strip them of their full process--the very well from which they must reach down to teach us anything relevant or meaningful--and in so doing, we reduce our own spiritual process to that of the consumer. We seek guarantees and shiny new things that won't break or falter. 

The imposition of perfection on others so that we will feel self righteous or safe is how we imprison and diminish. Oftentimes, the ones who praise and adore a teacher most enthusiastically are the same ones who will judge and attack with equal vigor. The adoration and the condemnation are two sides of the same coin: we forget who we are and make it all about someone else. It's precarious, and it further mires us in the disconnect. If the only relationship you have to your "teacher" is one in which they stay the same so that your ego and stories are never challenged, then it's a fragmented and unstable one. That is, you only interact with one aspect of another because it reconfirms what you are already committed to believing and seeing. That is the work of an idol, a model, a statue to praise so you never need enter the temple of your own being.

When we demand that someone else be perfect in order for us to commit to or know our own practice, we miss the point. Tragically so. If our spiritual mettle depends on others living up to some ideal we hold, then it's not a practice. It's more like a performance we watch safely from a distance, inspired by those we ask to proxy the experiences we are too afraid to have ourselves. And then we can just remain spiritual critics in our balcony seats, never once stepping onto that stage under those lights ourselves.

Still, other people want a teacher. A friend. Someone who helps light the pathway home. Not to a better place, but to who we already are. Someone whose flaws we can relate to and through whose humanity we better understand our own divinity. In a teacher, we want someone who has walked though the fires; not someone who has merely learned to avoid them or had the privilege of denying them. A teacher is someone who insists, no matter what we are applauding or booing in them, that we look within and stop projecting our own discoveries onto others. 

Our work as students of yoga is, in part, to see the divine in all things--not just in the situations or people who kowtow to our demands. We don't give up on that process of exploration when a teacher reveals tender spots or broken pieces or their doubts or transformations. Instead, when we name the "teacher" in all things, we commit to seeing ourselves in all things. A teacher is that which reveals us to ourselves. No more or less. With idols, we see only the other--insisting (often with unconscious zeal) their beauty, their imperfection, their power, their ruin. Through a teacher, we learn to see ourselves. Because the role of a teacher, ultimately, is not to be perfect and uphold our fragile expectations, but rather to awaken us to our own innate perfection. The fact is, the universe--and everyone in it--won't bend and yield to our will, our egos, our ideals. The task we face is to meet the world--and everyone in it--as is and let that unruly, unpredictable, dynamic dance call us home into full presence of (and accountability for) who and what we are.

I have spent the last several months in many conversations with some of my own teachers about what it is each of us is called to do AS a teacher, and why. Because the truth is, as many of you know, being a teacher of this stuff is not easy. It's not just a job, there aren't simple roles we play, there are few securities, and it can be profoundly isolating to do the work one must do in order to serve from a place of truth. If we are any good at what we do, we are humbled and tumbled by Life over and over, and we serve from that.

Some of my teachers were very stubborn in saying that the teacher's love for the student is always far greater (and more spacious, I would add) than the student's love for the teacher. Back then, so in awe of my teachers and what they inspired in me, I had a hard time believing that. It seemed like an unfair and strange thing to assert. After all, why would anyone quantify love like that?

But over the years, I have developed a different understanding of what this suggests. It's not about how much, but how broadly and spaciously. I think it has to do more with the guru principle (a force, a phenomenon) rather than the interactions between two people. When we reflect on "the seat of the teacher" we consider what that relationship allows (provokes, ignites) in us as students. As students, when we name someone "teacher," we give ourselves a safe place to rub against barriers and to meet our shadows and our light, hell...to meet ourselves in new (often disarming) ways. Another teacher reminded me a few years ago that the teacher gives us a safe place to fall apart. To crash, to fall, to unravel, and to struggle. And that is so often what a teacher is for us--a place to feel and reveal our vulnerability as well as a place to remember our strength. The teacher holds space for all of it.

My most formative teachers have been the ones in whose presence I could do just that, and in their eyes I saw only love. Not judgment or even the patronizing coddling of "there, there, it will get better." The teacher doesn't love you because your are flawless or do things perfectly, and s/he will not give/withhold love according to your performance. The teacher loves us through it ALL, because the teacher's only job is to see us as already whole and divine--to insist on it until we are reminded as well and can sustain that vision in an embodied, real way. Your struggles are not grounds to judge or condemn you or exile you. The teacher bears witness to the ups and downs, the spirals out and in, and never stops loving you. We learn this from Yoga Sutra III.18. The teacher sees all that has led you to this moment, all that has come before, and they understand it. They love you for it. They know AND they love. Not they know and they judge. Or they see and they condemn.

And the truth is, that kind of "holding space" is woefully rare in life, nor is it expected to flow both ways. Most relationships in our lives are fraught with judgements about what we do/don't do and whether or not someone is living up to our ideals. But a sincere teacher doesn't limit her/his love based on a reward system. That is, when we name someone "teacher," we ask that they hold loving space for us to make our way home, no matter how mean, petty, messy, inconsolable, terrified, or ugly our path may be. In their presence, it's all about us. We get to work it out, and we get to do so because there is an inherent and necessary imbalance there. Because they can't ask that we extend to them the same courtesy, the same space, or the same compassion. Not really. We may want to, or think we are capable of that, but the truth is that we kind of need our teachers to be perfect while we work out what it is to be human. We get over that, in time, but it's a tough road for a lot of people. The ones we are so willing to make gods are the ones we must tear down. And that is a good thing. Any teacher who enjoys the pedestal ought to fall, and fall fast and hard. But our teachers also feel fear, doubt, pain, and longing. And that doesn't diminish them. We want to walk through the fires they know personally. They stumble on the very things that they can eventually point to and say, "caution!"

Through my conversations with Mark Whitwell, however, I have also learned that part of our spiritual maturation is to move to that place where the teacher is, in fact, no more and no less than a friend. These days, the teachers I work with most closely as a student are in fact that--no more and no less than friends. There is sincere friendship through which a mutual understanding arises. We call forth in one another the highest and best, and together, in the messy work of being human, we offer one another the faith that we are already divine. And somewhere in that simple teaching I find ground for my own ever-shifting being in a way that still calls me into the seat of the teacher. Some of the teachers I most adored and from/through whom I have learned, been rewired under, been initiated, and been empowered are also some I have railed and rebelled against, judged, and sought perfection from. When I look back, as I got my own sea legs, there were many mutinies in which I was all too ready to withhold my love or respect for the ones who taught me I could sail. Yet the ones who have taught me the most over time are those teachers who have met me, in each and every incarnation, chapter, or shitty pit stop, with love and that certainty that I am worthy, as is. As is. Always. All ways.

My greatest teachers are friends, not gods or judges or celebrities. My greatest teachers are human and invite me to be human, too. They walk me through my fires and make me less afraid of the flame, the burning, the ash. And my greatest teachers love generously, no matter what Life provokes in either of us. Today, like all days, I am grateful for the teachers I have had--the ones I put on pedestals, the ones who fell, the ones who inspired me, and the ones who have disappointed me. In each case, they led me to look at me, not them. They taught me to recognize that whatever they aroused was about me. And they awakened in me the courage and humility to answer when I was named "teacher," and to do so from a place that is fleshy and real. So, that is my commitment these days. Not to just pay lip service to the teachings while insisting on some perfect, untouchable role I play. If I want those who name me "teacher" to embrace their fullness--their shadows as well as their light, their fragility as well as their power--then I must be willing myself to do just that. The teachers I love best and from whom have learned to love myself better are those who show me that it is THROUGH my humanity that my divinity is revealed. Not in spite of it.

(Note: To be clear, this is not a blog about the very real and repugnant abuses wherein a teacher--someone with a kind of power--exploits or harms a student. In those awful and all too common circumstances, responsibility and culpability are INDEED the teacher's. What interests me here is the more subtle ways in which we idealize and demonize those we have asked to help us grow.)