How the Mundane Becomes Sacred

Some teachers say that there’s no such thing as 9th graders - there are only 8th graders and 10th graders, and students in the 9th grade fall into one of those categories.

One thing that I like about 9th graders is that most of them come into high school with eyes wide open. For most 9th graders, high school is new physical, social, academic, and athletic territory. The kindling is prepared and they’re ready to be lit on fire by this new experience.

In other words, they’re primed for awe - an emotional mixture of wonder and reverence, maybe a little fear.

Sophomores tend to be different. They seem to carry a bit more arrogance, like they know the ropes. The only thing different for them is that they now have experience, a past to draw on, and gives them permission to feel more settled and comfortable. They seem to know this territory a bit better, so they’re more confident.

And school is less exciting for them because they think they know.

We adults are the same way. With our own lives each stage brings something new to which we open our eyes wide. Then we get used to it and run on autopilot. We do this in our jobs, in our routines, and with our families. We think we know.

And that’s how we diffuse the sacredness out of our lives.

Each of us is a miracle. Your two biological parents: 1 million eggs that the female body produces in a lifetime and 5 billion sperm cells the male body produces in a lifetime - there’s a 0.00000000000002% chance that you are the one who would’ve been born from all those cells.

And here you are.

It is in emotions like awe, love, and joy that our spirit suffuses our experience. And we can actually bring those emotions with us wherever we go. There is no mundane when we bring awe, love, or joy with us. From any one of them, the mundane becomes sacred and we awaken.

For the last couple days since beginning this post, my 1% better has been to see the sacred in the everyday. How could I have forgotten how good this feels? Being in love with the people in my life, with the feeling of the ground and objects against my feet and hands, with the sunlight against the trees...

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Spirit Murdered, or Spirit Obscured?

Last night I had a dream that I was walking through school with a baby. A student asked me about it and so I held the baby up and looked at him. Beautiful, curious, awake. Kicking legs and wide open eyes. And then he smiled. Even now as I remember the dream, my body warms and each of my cells smile in return. (I’m not usually all gaga for babies, but I certainly was with my own and it clicks on sometimes with others.)

There’s just no layer between a baby and it’s core awareness, its spiritual essence. It’s a pure being, a "wisp of un-differentiated nothingness."All of us still have that fundamental level of awareness. Actually, all of us are that fundamental level of awareness - we've just distracted it with thought. Babies haven't gotten around to being trained in that yet, and our love for them is actually us reawakening, even if just for a moment, to that part of ourselves.

In a professional development workshop that our faculty participated in last year at the beginning of school, the workshop presenter asserted that many of us teachers are responsible for "spirit murdering" our students. We were told that through our ignorance, intentional and unintentional discrimination, and our inherent biases, we are spirit murdering our students.

This was likely just metaphor to get us to see the intensity of our impact on students, but maybe not. Either way, I think this highlights a flaw in our approach to education, the "untruths" that we are fragile, we should reason with our emotions, and that life is a battle between good and evil.

Yes, our students’ bodies and our bodies are breakable. There are wounds, scars, and stored traumas, some diagnosed and mostly undiagnosed, that have become part of our physiological and mental lives. All of us, and some more than others. But these wounds, scars, and stored traumas can’t reach our spiritual core. They can cover it up with distracting stories and thinking, but injury can’t so much as tarnish our fundamental nature.

Our students, like us, are spiritually unbreakable. Yes, "life happens" and we add layers of obfuscation on top of our spirit. We do so because we want to survive and we think that these layers of guardedness, cynicism, resignation, and “being real” protect us from real hurt and maybe death. But these layers obscure our light, and we wonder why life gets so dark sometimes.

It’s totally fine that we do this - it’s natural and probably a good idea sometimes. The problem, though, is that we forget that we are the ones doing it. All we know is how we feel, and out of compassion, empathy, and fear we want to protect our kids and students from the same fate. So we misdiagnose their problems just like we’ve misdiagnosed our own problems.

The source of our internal challenges is not the world outside. The real source is being out of touch with our own wholeness and ability to respond no matter the circumstance - our innate response-ability to thrive creatively. And the layer of obfuscation that’s dimmed our light is only as solid as our thinking about ourselves and the outside world.

A teacher’s (and parent’s) job isn’t to avoid hurting a student’s spirit. The spirit can't be hurt. Instead, a teacher could encourage, guide, and support the thriving of students’ spirits. Imagine a world where students are guided to thrive in their fullest awareness and understanding, creativity and self-expression, and freedom to live from their own innate wisdom, clarity, and well-being.

How we do that is to model that our experience of life is much more from the inside-out than the outside-in, and to model what it is to thrive in life no matter the circumstances.

It begins with a willingness to be responsible for our experience of life.

Out of fear of hurting our students’ spirits, we’ve become afraid of nudging them toward insight for themselves, insight grounded in their whole, perfect, and unbreakable essence. It's as if out of fear of skin cancer, we’re keeping our kids from even seeing the sun.

Well, here comes the sun.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

"Oh Crap" Transformed

When I began my last job, I was excited for the first week during new teacher orientation. I was learning and growing, and the intriguing community was becoming a part of me. Then, sometime in the second week as existing teachers returned to school too and the busy-ness picked up, I had an “oh crap, what have I done?” moment. All of a sudden, the world darkened and I felt anxious that I’d made a mistake in changing schools.

That darkness eventually moved along, and over the next couple years at the school there was a lot of sunshine, periods of clouds, and occasional storms.

Switching schools again this summer, I had my first “oh crap, what have I done?” moment a couple days ago. The circumstances were that we were sitting in a meeting planning out a 3-day retreat for students that’s happening in a few weeks. It felt like we were going from one meeting to the next, and I wasn’t getting any closer to being prepared for my actual classes.

That “oh crap” moment turned into anxiety that lasted through the evening and into the morning. Then, with an insight during my morning routine (while reading this), my experience transformed.

The insight I had was that there was a thought underlying my feelings of anxiety, fear, and despair. The thought, “I made a mistake,” led directly to the emotions.

It wasn’t the circumstances of my decision or the new job at all that made me anxious. My feelings were solely wrapped up in my thinking, specifically a judgment, about the circumstances.

When I saw that it was just this thought underpinning my anxious experience, the feelings disappeared without effort. It wasn’t the decision to change jobs or the new job that was determining my emotions at all, it was just a thought. And suddenly I was reconnected to my life and not just my thinking about my life.

The feeling I’ve now got is one of being unshackled and free. From this place, the people at work are more lovable, the tasks are more enjoyable, and life is a lot brighter. The work will get done, and the anxiety is optional.

For me, this story is a reminder of three key aspects of our fundamental nature.

First, our circumstances are neutral - they're not good or bad - and they don’t give us our emotions. Circumstances are the facts, the what’s so. Circumstances are measurable in the physical world and what would hold up in a court of law. And the circumstances themselves carry no inherent significance. This is tough to see sometimes. The circumstances really do seem to carry significance! But they don't.

It is not Circumstances → Emotion.

Second, instead of our circumstances, it’s our thinking that gives us our emotions. Like screeching in fear at the stick we thought was a snake, “we live in the feeling of our thinking." If the circumstances are neutral, then it’s our thinking about them that gives us our emotions.

It is Circumstances → Thought → Emotion.

Third, the experience of insight is an experience of Truth. It's like glimpsing at heaven through a crack in the sky. It’s a candle in an otherwise pitch-black room. It's seeing the code behind the Matrix. Insight is a glimpse at truth, and it’s a truth that sets us free. Like an instance of pure joy, laughter, or ecstasy, insight gives us a direct experience of our spiritual nature.

When I had this insight, it occurred to me that perhaps there's no such thing as mistakes. Maybe mistakes only exist in our descriptions, our language, our thinking. While I could've heard or read this perspective on mistakes, having an insight into the nature of this "mistake" experience for myself allowed me to see the wisdom in it.

You see, insight is not positive thinking. It really is a glimpse at Truth, and while others can share and guide us to it, only we can see it for ourselves.

Thanks so much for engaging with my work. ❤️