The teaching relationship

Dear friends,  We have been journeying through the broad territory of religious and spiritual wounding. We have looked at how the superego is projected onto sin, onto God, onto all the great teachings. This week we focused on what we project  onto spiritual, religious, philosophical teachers, living or dead.

The teaching relationship is a precious relationship. We all need teachers. And yet so often they go awry. We approach teachers with hopes, wishes and sometimes a kind of magical idealization. They have something we need and want to learn. Perhaps that can be relatively straightforward if we are trying to learn organic chemistry (although that did not go so well for me years ago!!!). But when we need a spiritual teacher what we need to learn and embody is quite mysterious.

Once again we are confronted with our earliest projections onto our first encounter with mother who we experience as godlike, her loving breast or a bottle of warm milk. This experience of love, nourishment, warm embrace, holding, merging is a powerful imprint on the soul. Those of you who have had children will remember the rooting behavior of the infant, the insistence to be fed, the howling out of hunger and this bliss of finding the nipple and satiation of the need. This orientation to the mother becomes unconsciously our orientation to the divine. It is outside of us, in heaven, in the Guru, in the teacher, in the priest, ultimately in mother. We don't have it, whatever the it is. Someone else bigger and wiser than we has it. Hopefully the teacher does actually know something, has realized some spiritual wisdom and is not a complete fraud. Sadly there are false teachers. We really do need something from our teachers, but because of the earliest of imprints we may unconsciously become childlike, dependent, and incapable of discernment. And so we fall into deficiency, we give our power away, and lack the maturity to hear and receive the teachings. This can be extraordinarily painful especially if the earliest experience of mother was less than optimal. Then we may relive or recreate old patterns of victimization and abuse. In a nut shell the kingdom of heaven is outside of us, not our very nature, our very own living presence. And so we keep seeking outside.

The practice of presence is so important because it challenges this tendency to look outside. This outer gaze is hard wired, and we need it for our survival. Our practice brings our gaze, our attention inward, into the body, into sensation. We are going against the grain of our conditioning, the orientation of our egos. Perhaps you can see why this is a practice.  We are working the muscle of the inner gaze, bringing it inward over and over, until at some point it becomes second nature. We don't loose the outer gaze, it is incredibly useful, but we are bringing forth a depth, a sensitivity, the landscape of our living being, our living presence.

One of tendencies of the child, around 2-5 years is to idealize the parent. This an important stage in development. It makes us feel secure, very special, very important to be blessed with the best mommy and daddy in the world. They become godlike and may even seem to have superhuman powers. And if we don't have idealizable parents we will find surrogates like characters on television or in books, or teachers in school or in church. There is something about the mystery of the spiritual realm that invites this kind of idealization. And we give them our all, our love, our devotion, our trust. It almost seems inevitable. Can you see that tendency in your life? And when we find out that they are very human, or even unethical the crash is very painful. We feel betrayed, we feel a deep loss of love and trust.

Some of us never recover from this and walk away from any teaching relationship. So we throw away the chance to learn and grow in this way because the hurt is simply too painful. Or we become rebellious and create adversarial relationships with our teachers. In either case the relationship is blocked. And what is precious is lost.

We explored the phenomenon of projection last Monday. How and what do we project on our teachers. What impact does this have on our openness and receptivity to receiving what we long and need to hear?Are we too distrustful or too arrogant to allow the mystery to open up?

I have been blessed with many teachers over my life. Some have blown up and left me reeling in pain, others I outgrew. Most I idealized and when the projections became clear I felt disillusioned and walked away. But throughout I have known that I could not do this work without their help and wisdom. All of these experiences have taught me much, how I got lost in the drama of projection.  I am now discovering what it means to have teachers with fewer and fewer projections, expectations and superego judgements. It is a profoundly mysterious relationship. It truly opens many doors. I hope that as you take a look at this rich history you will find ways to see through the many layers of projection and come to see that what you see and love in the teacher is your own nature reflected back to you. It is your nature, who you are. We mistakenly think it is out there. That is the mystery of projection!

We won't be meeting next Monday 5th. Hope to see you on February 10th. Prayers for all of you suffering from the flu.  Warmly, Alison.