ON BEING A MESSY TEACHER

Have you noticed how often teachers have a reserve around themselves when it comes to the personal? They'll let you know a bit, and it can feel like that is measured, enough to demonstrate they are human like you - therapists sometimes pull this one too - but they essentially remain beyond you. This is in order to protect their authority, as they see it.

I try to come from the opposite place: the more I can be open about myself personally, the more the people around me will feel they can be with themselves too, warts and all. And what is teaching, apart from that? It's not like I have something lofty to impart, you can go and read books for that. We are here to show up, to be in good relationship with ourselves - particularly the bits we may not approve of - and we can let Spirit do the rest. It is not our job to judge and then to attempt to change ourselves, we will probably just get in the way if we try to do that. Our tiny selves are part of a vast consciousness whose designs are entirely beyond us, though we may sometimes catch the odd hint.

So my job, if I am teaching, is essentially just to show up in a personal way, whatever the forms, like Medicine Wheels, that I may have surrounded the teaching with.

It is in the personal that we find the transpersonal, the spiritual, the metaphysical. The more deeply we listen to ourselves - something that muggles avoid as best they can - the more we find ourselves listening to the whole universe, for we are not separate, as any decent mystical tradition will tell you. This is why it is so important for the teacher to show up personally, with all their embarrassing failings: when we do that, Spirit shows up, for Spirit loves a bit of humility. And when we do that collectively, something special and powerful enters the room. Sobornost, the Russian church calls it, the religious context that can heighten, rather than subsume, individuality.

I once did an astrology reading for someone who had put themselves in the teacher position. And I could not get near them. Their current relationship was a central issue, but they wouldn't discuss it. There was nothing I could do. The reading had to stay superficial. They had a 'together' identity to protect, as a mark of their spiritual attainment.

I think the real attainment is to be a mess, and to be able to acknowledge that in a specific way to yourself and others. We have a human body, we will always be a mess in at least a few ways. Teaching is about knowing you are in the gutter, saying why you are in the gutter, but looking up at the stars nonetheless.

When you do this, it is much harder for people to put you on a pedestal, maybe to their frustration, but it means there can be a real interchange, and what else are we here to do?