Pour Me a Pint of What I’m Really Looking For

We held a memorial service for a loved one this past summer. He was a good man and a good father. He worked hard. He was loyal. He loved traditions.

Many of us know and may be adults who struggle to experience relaxed well-being except with a substance. Like our loved one who died too young (mid-40s), we struggle to see our beauty and the sacredness of our spirit through misconceptions about ourselves and our nature.

How many of us are hooked on a substance that we know isn't giving us any authentic freedom, but the faux sense of well-being it gives is better than any alternatives we know about?

It scares me that in our mid-40s and mid-50s we aren't immune to the allure of a substance to give us what we could've learned long ago to access on our own.

We all want to satiate our desire to relax, connect, and be well. That desire is inherent in our biology and spirituality. Well-being is what our desires are meant to lead us to. Well-being is what our fears are meant to protect.

Our culture tells us that the main source of that sense of well-being is external: sex, alcohol, caffeine, and other substances and products. We fraternize in the faculty room about our drinking traditions. We plaster our sports arenas and commercial screens with advertisements. TV shows and movies often glorify it. And most of us buy into it all without question. “This day will get a whole lot better when I get a drink in my hand.”

The truth is, however, that well-being is always with us - it can’t actually leave us. You and I, whether we recognize it or not, are demonstrations of the magic and sanctity of life, but we’re lucky if we ever even notice it. It's there - we’ve just never really learned how to reliably connect with it from the inside-out.

Our students mostly meet our academic requirements in high school for English, Science, History, and Math. Let’s not have a single student enter adulthood without an understanding and ability to access their fundamental nature and capacity for well-being - that we are actually whole, untarnished, and unbreakable, from the inside-out.

I am on a mission to transform schools, and it begins with teachers, the adults already in the room.

Thank you for reading. ❤️

P.S. I don't mean to suggest that substances and our use of them is inherently wrong or immoral. What I mean to say is that it's so easy to abuse substances as a replacement for something so much better for us and others, and my work is to share access to true well-being.

Digging Deeper

Yesterday I was getting some work done in a public place at school and a colleague walked by to chat. How was your weekend? Did you see the game? I always find it fun to catch up with this colleague.

Then I had an inspiration to ask a deeper question: what did you learn about yourself this weekend? I didn't think it was a great question at the time, but I knew I wanted to ask something meaningful and it's the only question that came to mind.

He and I then talked for 45 minutes about self-understanding, the nature of our experience, religion, God, and spirituality, and what we see possible for ourselves and others. I didn’t get the prep work done that I had planned on doing during that time, but I got something else that I really needed: I was plugged back in and reconnected to Source.

There’s nothing wrong with surface-level conversations. It’s how most of us connect with each other and it satisfies an important need. The territory is safe and we feel some level of confidence (well, if we saw the game anyway). But maybe every once in a while we can go deeper, even if only to explore a little bit. We might just find ourselves waking up a little more to awareness, life, and love.

Below are some questions to help us go deeper. It’s okay to start by saying, “I’ve got a strange question…” Perhaps even start by considering these for yourself:

• What have you learned about yourself recently?

• What are you working on about yourself?

• What’s a small thing that gives you a lot of satisfaction?

• If you could change one thing about yourself or your perspective, what would you change?

• What inspires you?

• What do you think is your biggest gift to the people around you?

• If you could give one gift to humanity, what would it be?

• What are a couple ways of being that you’d love to embody?

• What are some things you're grateful for?

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Two Ingredients for Making Magic

There are two key ingredients to magical teaching, and these ingredients can be applied well beyond the field of education.

The first ingredient is that the magic isn’t in the teacher, it’s in the student. The more we recognize that there’s a creative, loving, and passionate genius within each of our students, the less our job becomes about getting somewhere in a lesson and the more it becomes about supporting students to unleash this genius. Once we realize that we all already have everything we need to thrive in life, we can simply respect, honor, and support the perfection already within ourselves and others.

The second ingredient of magical teaching is to adjust to the terrain in front of you, no matter what the map says (I’ve found this principle to be true with life goals as well). Teachers have objectives, intentions, and goals in mind when working with students, and these goals are like a beacon in the distance. When we create a lesson plan, we have expectations that the class will follow the plan as designed and we’ll arrive at the beacon of understanding together.

However, the actual terrain of the journey can surprise us, and we’ve got to be aware and willing to adapt in the moment. We need to adjust to the bumps, sinkholes, mountains, and rifts that show up along the way. All it takes is to be aware and willing.

Try these ingredients in your own relationships, whether you're a teacher or not. Trust me, they're magical.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️