A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (25 page)

There are also things you can do to rejuvenate and try to bring the spark back. The techniques I mention in
Chapter 11
help to fight off and recover from exhaustion and burnout.

Facing Your Own Demons

Earlier in this chapter, I talked about handling crises and situations when people's personal issues surface as a result of learning. But what about your own baggage?

Becoming a teacher is an initiation of sorts. Initiation, by its very nature, is not comfortable. The point of initiation is to induce change in your life and transition you from one state, or point, to another. Teaching other people can do that too. Once you have stepped into the teaching arena, you will never be the same as you were before you did it, even if you never teach again. It will be a catalyst to your own learning and spiritual growth, but it might also cast a harsh light on your own baggage or issues you didn't know or remember you had.

And if that wasn't enough, students' crises or emotional responses to their experiences can trigger your own issues too. In fact, it's commonly said in my tradition that when you initiate someone, you go through initiation yourself all over again. It's true in the sense that you are participating in the ceremony again—albeit as the initiator, not the person being initiated—but also in that you are affected by it and change as a result. Melanie Henry talked to me about teaching making you face your own demons:

If you're squeamish on whatever level, believe me that the teaching will confront you with your own shit. So you'd better have some idea of that, and know how to face it. Especially it will make you face your shadow. Your students will for sure show you that you've got to be willing to deal with the scary, icky stuff that's part of the human condition.... If you set yourself up as a teacher of Witchcraft, you will not be able to avoid that, because you're a doorway—a doorway of initiation. People coming to you for Witchcraft are going to be people who do have at least a nod to dark stuff. You have to be willing to look into the darkness. You have to be able to have some of your strength come from that…. I think if you embrace Witchcraft as a spirituality, you have to make your peace with darkness—I don't mean darkness in terms of evil, I mean in terms of night.

Making peace with your darkness can mean many things, among them knowing your own weaknesses and less-healthy tendencies and devising ways to handle them. For example, if you are prone to taking things personally, it's good to know that and have a way to talk yourself through it if such a situation arises. It can also mean accepting the fact that without dark there is no light, and vice versa, and that we carry both within us at all times. As Pagans we don't have to accept a good-versus-evil mentality. Embracing and understanding your darkness can mean accepting that there are many shades of grey, both in you and in your students, which is easier said than done but important nonetheless.

Having your personal issues come up while you are teaching can be subtle and (relatively) easy to deal with, such as having doubts about your teaching or feeling insecure. These types of problems are among the most common, and often you can talk yourself out of them or have a friend help you do so. Issues of identity that make you do a lot of soul-searching can also come up. You might question why you're on your own path, whether you think you're “good” enough to teach, and your purpose in life. These questions aren't comfortable, but they're important questions to explore, no matter how they come up. In this way, teaching can be a catalyst for healthy stuff to surface in addition to all that emotional baggage.

It's important to have your own support system in place before or in case something happens. In many cases, it's not appropriate to rely on your students for emotional support, even if something happens while you are in class. Exceptions might be if you are co-teaching or if you have close friends in the group. Have a short list of friends, mentors, or family members in mind whom you can call if you need help or to talk. And, if you are going through a period of depression or anxiety or have unresolved issues from relationships or family history that might be triggered by students' problems, it's not a bad idea to “get your house in order” by doing some work with a therapist or counselor. You will be far better at helping students handle their problems if you are dealing with your own in a healthy way.

Try as much as possible to prevent whatever is happening to you from affecting the quality or atmosphere of your class, and keep any freaking out to a minimum while you're in students' presence. If you need to leave the room or cancel a class, do so, give them a reason, and reschedule later if possible. You don't have to be specific about the reason. “I'm very sorry, but I need to deal with a personal crisis/issue” is sufficient. It's crucial that your students know you are not perfect and that you have feelings, but they don't need to see you have an emotional meltdown. If you do have one in front of them, apologize and take responsibility for it.

It's also important not to blame students for what's happening or associate them with it if something they did or experienced in your class contributed to your issue surfacing. It's not their fault. Sometimes these things just happen. On the positive side, with the right support you can get a great deal of learning and healing out of these incidents, and you'll be more understanding and have more experience to help others handle problems that arise for them.

The self-care tips in
Chapter 11
can help you handle this sort of problem too.

[contents]

Chapter 11

Care and Feeding
of the Teacher

Self-care is essential for a long and happy physical life, and it's equally vital for a long, happy, successful Pagan teaching career. Strong ethics and boundaries provide a great foundation for self-care, but there are a lot of additional things teachers can do—and in some cases
should
do—to keep themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy while they are teaching. I have been teaching on and off for two decades, and whenever I have slacked off in any of the areas on the self-care list below, it has had a negative impact on my efficacy as a teacher. Do as I say and not as I do (did). Teacher, heal thyself!

I've divided the information below into long-term self-care—the preventive stuff you can do to try to keep yourself healthy and ward off problems—and short-term self-care—some ideas for how to recover from more acute situations where you need help
now
and the long-term stuff will take too long. If you follow the ideas in the long-term care, you should be able to significantly reduce the chances you'll end up in one of those acute situations, but, as we all know, the universe doesn't always follow our carefully laid plans.

Long-Term Self-Care

Find and Stick to Your Core

Your core is your purpose—your true will—and whatever connects you to it. Your core drives and fuels everything you do, to one extent or another, and it influences your will to teach and your teaching philosophy. It might or might not be tied to your spirituality, but for many Pagans the two seem to be intertwined, if not one and the same.

When you're busy teaching, working, doing the laundry, raising a family—just plain living—it's easy to lose touch with your core and forget why you're doing all this stuff in the first place. But your core is what nourishes you and makes everything else possible, so you need to reconnect to it regularly to stay in harmony with your purpose.

It's important to take time out from the daily grind to discover what reconnects you to your core. It might be that you need to spend more time by water or in nature. You might reconnect through meditation, physical activity, talking to loved ones, or music. The mechanism is different for everyone, so you'll need to discover it for yourself. And there might be more than one way for you to do it. Almost all of the methods above work for me.

Once you know what helps you find your core, make time to do it as regularly as you need to in order to keep in touch with your will. This might feel selfish, since you're taking precious time away from something else, but in fact it's not. You will function better and be happier if you are connected, and that will have a positive impact on the other areas of your life. You should not think of this as optional or unimportant. It is probably one of the most important things you can do.

Once you are connected, examine or re-examine why you started teaching. Look at how (or if) teaching is related to your true will. Remembering why you do this important work and how it supports your true will can help inspire you to be a great teacher and help you find the motivation to kick exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other problems.

Nurture Your Personal Practice

If you're teaching Paganism, chances are you are (gasp!) a Pagan, which means you have some path or tradition or ritual that you follow to express and experience your Paganism. It's very easy to neglect your own personal practice when you're helping others find theirs; it seems like there is never enough time for both. But you need to make time. Keeping in tune with your own spirituality and keeping up on what's going on in the community make you a stronger, more effective teacher.

I asked several of my interviewees if they had been taught to teach. T. Thorn Coyle discussed her various teachers but ended her statement with this: “Above all, though, daily spiritual practice is my teacher.”

Your personal practice also provides you with the space to continue making your own spiritual discoveries and communing with your gods. You are not expecting your students to be static, and neither should you be. Being open to spirit makes teaching from your core easier and more rewarding, and it can help keep you on track too. Christopher Penczak commented:

Really be open to the service of teaching, be open to guidance. Be able to work with spirit as you teach. That's the most important thing to me.

In addition, your spirituality nourishes you, and you need that nourishment to help others find their way. Plus, if your gods are anything like mine and you ignore them for too long, or if you act all hypocritical by teaching others Paganism but neglecting the gods yourself, they'll give you a cosmic boot to the head to get your attention. (As a result of my considerable experience on the receiving end of the divine boot to the head, I can attest that the gods really,
really
don't like hypocrisy.) A boot to the head from the gods is no laughing matter, so I encourage you to keep up your spiritual practice, even if it's just to avoid divine heel marks on your forehead.

Get a Change of Scenery

As I've mentioned already, we all get wound up in our daily lives and stuck in ruts. As spiritual people and teachers, however, it's important that we break free sometimes from the day-to-day so we can meet new people, get new information, or simply look at our lives from a different perspective. If we are not dynamic and constantly seeking new
information
and experiences, we become static—and boring—people and teachers. And we're much less likely to have these new experiences and insights if we rush like rats through a maze in the same pattern every single day. It's sometimes said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. When I feel like I've gotten myself stuck in a cycle of sameness, I know I need a change of scenery to rejuvenate and find inspiration.

For me, physically getting away from the places I see every day—my office, my home, my neighborhood—and going somewhere, anywhere else, whether it be in my own city or far away, is essential for sticking to my core and keeping the teaching spark alive. There is absolutely nothing like travel—even inexpensive, short-term travel—to reset your clock, so to speak; to give you time to take a breath and think about the world a little differently. Recently I saved up some money and took a solo trip to Crete. Wandering among the ruins of Knossos and Gournia and climbing down into the Dictaean Cave—places of power with a long spiritual history—reconnected me to the earth and the gods. And traveling around the island, talking to complete strangers and trying to speak a little Greek, gave me a peek at a lifestyle very different from own, which in turn gave me insight into my own world. A trip to Crete is expensive and probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but I have found that I can get similar benefits from simply leaving the city and going anywhere that is different enough from the places I see every day to allow me time and space to pause and reflect.

If travel isn't your thing, you don't need to go somewhere to get a change of scenery. Taking a class or volunteering with people you don't know can also give you a fresh perspective. The skills you learn and the people you meet can help you look at your life in a different way. The idea is to break your usual pattern, not spend a lot of money. And if the class or volunteer work is related to something you love, then you're feeding your core too.

I encourage you to do these things for yourself—this chapter is about care and feeding of the teacher, after all, and I want to emphasize that self-care without the thought of your students is essential—but you can also do something to get a change of pace with your students. Just make sure you're also doing solo work. In Washington State, the Aquarian Tabernacle Church holds an event each year called the Spring Mysteries, where they re-create the rites of Demeter and Persephone that were held at Eleusis in Greece. As part of the event, the organizers build shrines to the Greek gods. Three or four times my husband and I have gone with our students to help build shrines and experience the mysteries together. The process of planning, getting the materials for the shrines, decorating, and then experiencing the space we helped create in ritual not only gave each of us individual insights and fresh ways to look at our personal spirituality, but it also gave us some rich shared experiences to bond us as a group.

Find a Mentor

Everyone needs support, especially new teachers. When you go to formal teacher school and learn how to teach elementary or secondary students, you student teach for at least a semester with a trained, experienced teacher. It shouldn't be any different for Pagan teachers, but it usually is. If you can't turn to your own teacher for support, or if you didn't have one, consider finding people in the community who can mentor you and answer questions, or who you can “shadow” by watching or participating in their class to learn how they teach. Don't be afraid to ask for this kind of help. Your students will benefit from you sticking your neck out to get answers. Melanie Henry commented:

Ideally you have someone at whose feet you can sit for a while to model, so you can sort of student teach. At the very least, have someone you can ask questions of, and don't be embarrassed. I started out by being embarrassed when I had questions. Please ask your questions of somebody, because nobody knows everything, especially when you first get started. It's okay not to know everything. The more I do, the less I realize I know.

You don't have to meet your mentor in person, either. Online will do in a pinch.

Take on a Physical Practice

One of the things I highly recommend, both for self-care and for keeping connected to your core, is taking on a physical spiritual practice such as tai chi, yoga, or sacred dance. I have been doing tai chi for about fifteen years and dance on and off longer than that. Both practices greatly enhance my understanding of energy and how it moves through and with the body and how the physical and spiritual worlds connect. There's something about picking up my tai chi sword, moving it through the air, and feeling the energetic connection between the tip and my
dantien
(the energy center behind and slightly below the navel) that makes it seem like my world is in harmony. Or maybe I'm just happier when I'm holding a weapon. Anyway, I'm not alone in this opinion. T. Thorn Coyle appears to derive a great deal of her spirituality from physical practice. I asked her where her teaching comes from:

My teaching is informed by my practice, the way my mind and heart put things together, my understanding from the Gurdjieff Work, Sufism, Buddhism, and mysticism. It also is informed by my own guides and the particular syncretism of my path, which includes emphasis on the body and physical health and engagement.

If the spiritual benefits aren't enough, physical practice is also therapeutic and great exercise. Both of these make me feel better, which in turn helps me with everything else I do, including teaching. I feel so strongly about physical practice that I make my students choose and do a physical practice too (and they do, with a lot of grumbling and eye rolling).

Get a Life

It's very easy to get wrapped up in teaching and allow friendships and your social life to slip away. But friends are essential to your mental health. Having fun and laughing with friends is one of the strongest antidotes I have ever found to burnout and other teacher problems. As I said before, you shouldn't be relying on your students for social or emotional support. There are cases in which they might help you—especially if you are more or less peers or you were friends before you became teacher and student—but you really need a group of non-student peers who can support you, help you problem-solve, and make you get out of the house and do something frivolous and fun, just for yourself. It's important to have hobbies and interests that are your own and separate from your students too. This helps you retain your sense of personal identity and keeps you engaged with the world outside of teaching.

Don't Beat Yourself Up

Teachers can be their own worst critics. We know how important teaching is for our students and our community, and we want to do it well, so we are very hard on ourselves when we mess up. But teachers who are self-flagellating over a mistake aren't focused on what they need to be focused on: their students.

It's important that you treat yourself with the same compassion you show your students, or you're not going to last long as a teacher. You will make lots of mistakes, and you won't have the time or energy to beat yourself up over every single one. Besides, while you're wasting time doing that, you're missing out on everything else that's going on in your class, both good and bad.

Anne Marie Forrester commented: “Be kind to yourself. It's not always going to go perfectly.” Don't invest the mistake with more power by dwelling on it. Own it, apologize if necessary, learn from it, and move on.

There is an easy cure for beating-yourself-up syndrome, but it's not a pleasant one: simply make a really huge mistake and survive it. Making a mistake and realizing that the world isn't going to end as a result gives you a much healthier perspective. As Pete “Pathfinder” Davis pointed out, “You know, we learn best from blisters and scars.”

Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously

As I've said, teaching is sacred work. But that doesn't mean that it always has to be serious work. Allow yourself to find joy and humor in your situation, your students, and even your mistakes. We all know that “with great power comes great responsibility,” but don't think that because you're a teacher and you're in charge that you have to be serious and authoritative and suppress your natural personality. One of the great things about teachers is how diverse they are. They come from different backgrounds, different perspectives; each has something unique to offer. Don't stuff everything that makes you different to fit some sort of ideal you hold in your head of what a perfect teacher should be. Christopher Penczak told me how he learned not to take himself too seriously: