Made-up Distinctions

We humans like to categorize. It keeps us organized and helps us survive and succeed. One seemingly useful categorization is that the classroom is for the mind, the athletic field is for the body, and the Church is for the spirit.

But many of the categories we create, including the ones above, are actually illusions. Useful illusions, but made up all the same.

Over the last year or so, I've been exploring the idea that there's no distinct mind, body, and spirit that a human "has." What if I am not a being who has a mind, a body, and a spirit, but instead I am mind, body, and spirit in one being. It's a subtle difference, but I like it.

The made-up distinction between mind, body, spirit, and Self is perhaps no longer useful in education. The question for us as teachers then becomes how can we best encourage and guide the development of the whole student?

Teaching physics and computer science content is just one of my goals with my students each day.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

"To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world."

-Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach

No Matter How Crappy We Can Be

When one of my kids entered kindergarten, we found him irascible and a bit mean at the end of the day. We wondered what was going on, and we figured that this behavior was probably showing itself at school too. When we asked his teacher about it at our first parent-teacher conference, the teacher said that he is wonderful during the day - thoughtful, caring, and engaged - and that he’s probably just exhausted from being “on” all day.

It became so much easier to be with him after that. We gave him the space to be expressed however he was feeling, we stopped taking it personally, and we were able to love who he was no matter how much he seemed to hate us some evenings.

As our kids enter their teens, we’re seeing some of that behavior again. It’s a relief to find a lot of room still available to love my kids despite how they show up sometimes. Not to condone mean or disrespectful behavior, but to bring compassion and understanding.

Compassion and understanding feel better than anger and frustration. They diffuse heated situations. They suck the oxygen out of the flames of anger. They're also more effective at settling emotions all around. They soften the rock and hard place that our kids, our spouses, and our students sometimes find themselves between.

For some reason, sometimes it's easier to bring compassion and understanding to strangers than to people we're close to. No matter who we're with, though, we've always got the capacity to bring compassion and understanding. It always makes a difference for us and others.

When we've seemingly reached our own limits and crossed the threshold into exhaustion and our own "witching hour," isn't it nice when someone else gives us the grace of compassion and understanding?

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

We're Made to Wobble

There’s an old toy from the 1970s called a Weeble. You can tilt a Weeble all the way over onto its side, but it will stand itself back up again - over and over again. Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.

The Weebles tilt under the forces against them. So do we. We feel pressure, we feel tension, and we feel stress. So we act against our circumstances and we push against those feelings because we’ve forgotten that we will always get back up. The Weebles always do, and so can we.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday, and she shared about the intensity and overwhelming busy-ness of her life at the moment. “Can’t you see it?!” she joked. “It’s swirling all around me!”

I obviously couldn’t see it how she did, so I asked her to describe it.

1) What’s actually happening in life? In other words: What are the circumstances?

We all have circumstances, and it feels like they pull and tug and push and press us sometimes. Like the Weeble we feel like we’re leaning over sideways under the weight of it all.

2) What does it actually feel like? What's in this feeling of overwhelm? We feel it in our body, so let’s really feel it in our body. For her, it was tension in the chest and shoulders, a tightness that felt like it was constricting her breath. She also felt nauseous in her stomach.

We hung out with those feelings for a couple minutes, just observing and describing them.

When we feel emotions, we usually think they’re telling us to act, but they're not. When we feel the pressure of overwhelm, we get busy and frenetic. When we feel threatened, we put up a fight or we run away. When we feel angry, we intensely express ourselves with righteous indignation. And so on.

3) She and I then did a grounding exercise, a guided meditation to expand our awareness of our body and our place in space, that lasted about 5 minutes. Upon opening our eyes, both of us were experiencing ease, clarity, peace, and well-being.

4) We got in touch with what we really want. Acting from stressful overwhelm doesn't usually serve what we're really after, what we're really committed to. In fact, my friend demonstrated beautifully that acting from overwhelm was actually hurting her chances at getting what she really wants - deep connection with the people in her life.

What if we can’t actually fail in life? What if we won’t buckle under the pressure? Like my friend pointed out when she found her feeling of clarity: the steaming kettle of her overwhelm wasn’t screaming at her to get more done and handle the craziness - it was telling her to settle down.

When we settle down and find feelings of clarity, ease, and presence, we both enjoy life a whole lot more and we’re more effective in our actions.

The truth is, we actually can’t fail in life, it only seems that way. For some of us, it seems that way a lot of the time. But our feelings might actually be pointing somewhere else, and we've just never learned to look in the right spot.

My friend and I left the conversation with this beautiful and simple reminder: taking care of our own well-being and fostering habits that bring us ease, clarity, and appreciation feels pretty amazing. And we’re better able to provide the care, thoughtfulness, and effort that our world has asked us for.

What's one thing that you can easily fit into your day that would serve your own well-being? After all, when the emotions flare up, we only need to give our bodies and minds enough room to right ourselves, just like the Weebles. We too are made to wobble, and we can always stand back up.

Thanks so much for engaging with my work. ❤️