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.
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