e-book A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery book. Happy reading A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery Pocket Guide.
"A Path with Heart" is an invitation to think about great teaching as a journey of self-discovery. Master Teachers understand, and research confirms, that it's not.
Table of contents

• A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
• Newsletter
• [MOST WISHED] A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mast…
• Post navigation

Neelama has been guiding people through personal transformation for over 13 years. She takes great joy in assisting people in the process of discovering themselves beyond their personality. She has a B. In , she began a successful life coaching business and in , she created Body Embraced, a seminar for women, out of her desire to transform the body discontent that most women experience into a vehicle for profound healing and growth. In , she co-created Devotion; Calling The Beloved a spiritual retreat focused on discovering, experiencing and deepening one's personal connection with The Divine.

For more information about Neelama and her work, please visit www. Maria Marrongelli has a background in psychology and alternative health and has been running a successful private practice in transformational coaching and bodywork since She has also been facilitating experiential workshops both in the US and Canada since Maria has helped many people over the past 12 years to understand and experience the connection between body, emotions and mind as a way of moving beyond the limitations of human conditioning.

Synandra Lechner, MBA, has 25 years of diverse senior management experience in public and private sectors followed by 10 years of management consulting for a variety of Federal Canadian Goverment Departments. They are merely the questions they have been taught to ask, not only by tuition-paying parents who want their children to be employable, but by an academic culture that distrusts and devalues inner reality.

Newsletter

Of course our students are cynical about the inner outcomes of education: we teach them that the subjective self is irrelevant and even unreal. We are obsessed with manipulating externals because we believe that they will give us some power over reality and win us some freedom from its constraints. Mesmerized by a technology that seems to do just that, we dismiss the inward world.

We turn every question we face into an objective problem to be solved-and we believe that for every objective problem there is some sort of technical fix. That is why our students are cynical about the efficacy of an education that transforms the inner landscape of their lives: when academic culture dismisses inner truth and pays homage only to the objective world, students as well as teachers lose heart. The Courage to Teach builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique but is rooted in the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Good teachers are authentically present in the classroom and are able to weave a complex web of connections between themselves, their subjects, and their students, helping their students weave a world for themselves. What does that look like? Recovering the heart to teach requires us to reclaim our relationship with the teacher within. This teacher is one whom we knew when we were children but lost touch with as we grew into adulthood, a teacher who continually invites me to honor my true self—not my ego or expectations or image or role, but the self I am when all the externals are stripped away.

In fact, conscience, as it is commonly understood, can get us into deep vocational trouble. But is it my vocation? Am I gifted and called to do it?

When I follow only the oughts, I may find myself doing work that is ethically laudable but that is not mine to do. A vocation that is not mine, no matter how externally valued, does violence to the self—in the precise sense that it violates my identity and integrity on behalf of some abstract norm. When I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with. How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students—the pain that comes from doing a work that never was, or no longer is, their true work?

The teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be, but of what is real for us, of what is true.

The voice of the inward teacher reminds me of my potentials and limits as I negotiate the force field of my life. If there is no such reality in our lives, centuries of Western discourse about the aims of education become so much lip-flapping. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name. Perhaps the idea is unpopular because it compels us to look at two of the most difficult truths about teaching.

We can, and do, make education an exclusively outward enterprise, forcing students to memorize and repeat facts without ever appealing to their inner truth—and we get predictable results: many students never want to read a challenging book or think a creative thought once they get out of school.

The second truth is even more daunting: we can speak to the teacher within our students only when we are on speaking terms with the teacher within ourselves. The student who said that her bad teachers spoke like cartoon characters was describing teachers who have grown deaf to their Inner guide, who have so thoroughly separated inner truth from outer actions that they have lost touch with a sense of self.

How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? I have no particular methods to suggest, other than the familiar ones: solitude and silence, meditative reading and walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will simply listen. That phrase, of course, is one we normally use to name a symptom of mental imbalance—a clear sign of how our culture regards the idea of an inner voice! But people who learn to talk to themselves may soon delight in the discovery that the teacher within is the sanest conversation partner they have ever had.

We need to find every possible way to listen to that voice and take its counsel seriously, not only for the sake of our work, but for the sake of our own health. If someone in the outer world is trying to tell us something important and we ignore his or her presence, that person either gives up and stops speaking or becomes more and more violent in attempting to get our attention. Similarly, if we do not respond to the voice of the inward teacher, it will either stop speaking or become violent: I am convinced that some forms of depression, of which I have personal experience, are induced by a long-ignored inner teacher trying desperately to get us to listen by threatening to destroy us.

When we honor that voice with simple attention, it responds by speaking more gently and engaging us in a life-giving conversation of the soul.

Post navigation

Measuring the value of inner dialogue by its practical outcomes is like measuring the value of a friendship by the number of problems that are solved when friends get together. Conversation among friends has its own rewards: in the presence of our friends we have the simple joy of feeling at ease, at home, trusted and able to trust.

• Categories!
• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
• with Michael Schiesser & Neelama Eyres?
• See a Problem??

We attend to the inner teacher not to get fixed but to befriend the deeper self, to cultivate a sense of identity and integrity that allows us to feel at home wherever we are. Listening to the inner teacher also offers an answer to one of the most basic questions teachers face: how can I develop the authority to teach, the capacity to stand my ground in the midst of the complex forces of both the classroom and my own life? In a culture of objectification and technique we often confuse authority with power, but the two are not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out.

This view of teaching turns the teacher into the cop on the comer, trying to keep things moving amicably and by consent, but always having recourse to the coercive power of the law. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all. I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my inner teacher, and therefore with my own authority.

In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades. But when my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me, I need neither weapons nor armor to teach. Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation.

Then teaching can come from the depths of my own truth—and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind. I have worked with countless teachers, and many of them have confirmed my own experience: as important as methods may be, the most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it. The more familiar we are with our inner terrain, the more sure-footed our teaching—and living—becomes.

Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives, and we need to find as many ways as possible to help that teacher show up. But if we want to develop the identity and integrity that good teaching requires, we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives—risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. The house soon divided along predictable lines.

On the other side were the student-centered folks, insisting that the lives of students must always come first even if it means that the subject gets short-changed. The more vigorously these camps promoted their polarized ideas, the more antagonistic they became—and the less they learned about pedagogy or about themselves.

The gap between these views seems unbridgeable—until we understand what creates it. At bottom, these professors were not debating teaching techniques.

1. A Path With Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery.
2. Thor (1966-1996) #165.
3. QiGong Movements for Legs and Feet?

If we stopped lobbing pedagogical points at each other and spoke about who we are as teachers, a remarkable thing might happen: identity and integrity might grow within us and among us, instead of hardening as they do when we defend our fixed positions from the foxholes of the pedagogy wars. But telling the truth about ourselves with colleagues in the workplace is an enterprise fraught with danger, against which we have erected formidable taboos. So we keep the workplace conversation objective and external, finding it safer to talk about technique than about selfhood.

Taking the conversation of colleagues into the deep places where, we might grow in self-knowledge for the sake of our professional practice will not be an easy, or popular, task. To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world. How can schools perform their mission without encouraging the guides to scout out that inner terrain? As this century of objectification and manipulation by technique draws to a close, we are experiencing an exhaustion of institutional resourcefulness at the very time when the problems that our institutions must address grow deeper and more demanding.

How this might be done is a subject I have explored in earlier essays in Change, so I will not repeat myself here.