Hands off learning. I never thought much about teachers in school, they were just there. From my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Rhine passing out rhythm instruments all the way to my thesis committee at FPC passing or failing me (I got HP, high pass, all three semesters, clinching an honors hood for me at graduation), they were just part of the deal. My schoolteachers were pretty good overall. A few were inspired, like Alice Miles, who taught me Latin in ninth grade, and a few were dubious, like Bung-Eye, my walleyed first form English master at the Duke of York who excoriated Kenyan students for their accents. What stands out were the times I had no teachers, and learned on my own: at USCS in Nairobi, and under the unwatchful gaze of my thesis committee, who were strictly hands off. I did quite well learning on my own. Unbeknownst to me I was getting help. But then I had to go looking for so-called spiritual teachers. Oh my, what an unsavory lot.
Student or disciple? I moved to Boulder as a student, eager to learn TH's healing system, Harmonizing. But my status as a student was already tainted with discipleship. I didn't just want TH to teach me his tricks, I wanted him to save me, to make me enlightened. Once I finally started making progress with love, long after I left Harmonizing behind, I learned that's impossible. No one can save me; no one can save anyone else. I can only save myself. Spiritual teachers are either con artists who just pretend to save people or clueless dopes who drink their own Kool-Ade. Religions offering salvation are bogus. Spiritual teachers don't want students, they want disciples. Schoolteachers who care about their students want them to think for themselves. They teach them how to make their own way. Spiritual teachers do the opposite. They turn students into disciples: subservient dupes they can manipulate to serve their often despicable whims. An unsavory lot.
Mom and Dad were my best teachers in childhood and among the best I ever encountered. My dad was a genius teacher, engaging and encouraging my natural curiosity about the world again and again. And again. Mom simply did what she did transparently: I was always welcome to jump in and participate if I wanted to. I learned to cook by helping mom out in the kitchen. Neither of them ever discouraged my explorations unless they had legitimate concerns about my safety. I didn't tell them about exploring that cave using a pop bottle of kerosene with a burning rag stuck in the top as a torch.
My problem with spiritual teachers. Consorting with spiritual teachers, via books or in person, was ultimately the wrong way for me to go. I had to find my own way. Books and teachers had their uses in the early stages of my spiritual quest. For the first fifty-five years of my life I was groping blindly; I hadn't found my way to my own spiritual path, to guidance I could count on. Until I found that, reading spiritual books and studying with teachers was helpful. It kept my attention on spiritual matters; it kept me seeking. But I never fell under anyone's spell. I never took the bait and plighted my troth to anyone. Somewhere in me I knew the whole master and disciple shtick was just plain wrong. So I never became one of TH's disciples. I just played along, pretending to be one. I got a lot of value out of moving to Boulder and being in Harmonizing but it was wrong for me to ever even dabble in being TH's disciple. The spiritual quest demands I find my own way, relying on my own internal authority. If I become a disciple I'm asking someone else to be in charge of my spiritual quest. But I'm the only one who can be in charge because the real answers to my questions are inside me. When I first moved to Boulder TH seemed to be talking that talk: Harmonizing was touted as a system uniquely tailored to each student's needs. But getting guidance from my body via muscle testing is bogus if someone else is interpreting the results. That's a conflict of interest. The interpretation will likely support the interpreter's interests. Spiritual advice from anyone but my own internal authority is worthless. Making progress with love is self discovery: extracting the wisdom from my own life so I become wiser. I can't get that from anyone else. Just directly from my own experience.
Trust must be earned. Spiritual teachers seem to want disciples willing to surrender to them completely. But only a fool would surrender without trusting the teacher, and trust must be earned. Leela patiently earned my trust step by step. She started by guiding me through dietary changes that made me lose fifty pounds and keep it off. She guided me through leaving my dead-end marriage, helped me quit drinking and helped me understand that drugs are never a legitimate way to feel good. She earned my trust by starting with low-risk projects then building to projects that seemed very risky indeed at the time. As for TH, well, he was good at trolling for disciples. He pulled off some impressive tricks to cajole me into signing on. I just couldn't buy it. He was charming and magnetic and said all the right things but he was also just a curly headed boy from Philly who talked too fast. As I've learned how deep surrender can be I've come to understand why I had such a hard time trusting him back then. Surrender is a big deal.
Learning and teaching dance. I started learning partner dance at Living Traditions in 1992. I had recently turned forty, so I was much too late out of the gate to achieve mastery. Mastering a set of skills begins in childhood and adolescence. That's when I started learning writing skills. If I start that early the skills I learn help form me. They become part of who I am. I started dancing at forty and got relatively good. I ended up teaching dance to many receptive and enthusiastic students starting in 1999. After teaching dance for eighteen years I burnt out on it. My burnout started with a feeling of discomfort and dissatisfaction when I taught but soon progressed to deep misery before, during and after teaching. In the meantime I got sucked into tango. I began taking tango classes in 2010. Progress was slow because of my age but thanks to Ruth's love and support I was able to keep at it. But after eight years it started getting harder and harder to be in class, until attending even just a pre-dance drop-in class was sheer torture. I could no longer learn from an outside source like that, and trying to force myself to do that felt truly dreadful. I have reached the stage of life where I have to turn inward and learn from Leela, learn from my own body. I have to surrender to my own deep wisdom, my own internal authority. That works beautifully for musicality but it doesn't help me much with vocabulary and fine points of technique. I'm so grateful to all the amazing tangueras who are happy to dance with me anyway. When Waltz etcetera opened back up in 2021 I had no intention of teaching dance. But as we moved through that first year, it became clear that some kind of class would be a good idea, inspiring new people to give Waltz etcetera a try. I started teaching with some trepidation because of how wretched teaching felt before. But to my delight it feels lovely to teach again, and my students are as enthusiastic as before.