Learning

We relax to settle into who we are – really who we are beneath the millennia of conditioning. It is quite a task – to undo all that and retrieve our essential nature in one lifetime. The trouble is we generally have no idea what we really are and we are usually the least qualified to say, although we may have inklings every so often. The teacher is the person in your life most qualified to give you such guidance. Their clarity and the fact that they have retrieved much of their essential nature means they can see, with relative ease, where you are coming from and where you are going. But more importantly they can see other possibilities – a wholly different world beneath your conditioned responses. And it does appear as a different world – quite apart from the one you are living. It is not just a different track or path, it is a wholly different everything – the philosophical foundations to the life the teacher sees for you – the reasons for living – are very different to your own, no matter how much sympathy and empathy you feel when in the teacher’s company. There is nothing quite so depressing for a teacher as telling a student something important which they clearly have no real idea about and then for them to say that they understand completely, or even worse, that they know it already. If your teacher gives you instruction then you don’t know, otherwise why would they bother telling you. If you really understand something then it will have found its way into every cell of your being – it is not just an idea in your head. It is always striking when you come across students of Tai Chi who have never done pushing hands. They may look expert but when you come to stand in front of them and put your hands on them they will be as inept as a beginner – often worse because they wont have the beginner’s humility or openness. The second most depressing thing for a teacher is telling a student something and being met by a total lack of understanding. If the teacher teaches something it is because the student is ready for that instruction, so being met by incredulity or stupidity just means quite an aggressive resistance is going on.

When you are with your teacher you have to assume that they are all knowing, not because they are but because it is the most efficient way of learning. Most of what you pick up from the teacher comes through osmosis rather than through cogitative reasoning. Osmosis happens on an energy level and a cellular or molecular level, so it can only happen if you open up and connect on those levels. When you are with your teacher you shouldn’t just be undergoing a struggle to comprehend, but a struggle to join and approve. Learning is as compassionate an act as teaching. The most important point I can make here, and it is crucial (I’ve met less than a handful of people in my life who understand it), is that joining and approving is not something you can turn on when you feel like it – you have to do it all the time – you must live like that – it must be the reason you live. Enter, join and become, or open, embrace and transform – the actions of the heart. We work to place these at our foundation. If they don’t seem to work, or you find you’re easily taken advantage of as a result then it’s because you haven’t taken them deep enough. The journey is the process of taking them deeper, and the deeper they go the less you seem to know, and the more fragile, vulnerable and incapable you feel. But this is just a reflection of your absolute courage – your refusal to close off at any point – your refusal to compromise.