Teachers who taught without teaching

Olivier Goetgeluck

COACHING & WORKSHOPS

Dear Reader,

I have been fortunate to have had multiple teachers who taught without teaching.

The teaching consisted of shared experience, followed by shared inquiry - questions such as:

What did you experience?
What came up during practice?
Which images did you see in the visual exercise?

There was an implicit approach to their facilitation.

They pointed, yes - but they did not want me to describe their finger, nor bite it, nor worship it. `

There was always this aura, this mood of shared adventure.

They were on it, and welcomed me to join.

A non-linear tagging-along rather than a linear, authoritative approach.

Findings, observations, intuitions were not put in my mouth.

They kept open space and patient time - a deliberate part of the practice environment - so I could find the words to articulate my experience inwardly.

This element is often awkward and tedious, in that it demands active participation with the material.

Here I see the gold of their approach in a culture addicted to following protocols that atrophy this ability.

I notice I often frustrate those I work with initially. I am at ease with this frustration, because I was there too and I know what I want to keep alive in them.

The questions becomes better, deeper, when learning goes beyond receiving both the question and the answer up-front:

Daring to ask,
to follow your questions to its end,
and to always leave space for not-knowing
makes for a longer, more meaningful ride.

Therefore, thank you, teachers
- those still alive and those who already passed over -
for not teaching.

For not closing the topics.
For never fully defining.
For understanding the long game - and therefore not gratifying my curiosity in the short term.

"What will it do for me?"

Let's try! Together.

"So - what did you experience?"

IN SEARCH OF ...

Rumi on being drunk:

"Drunk without wine; sated without food; distraught; foodless and sleepless; a king beneath a humble cloak; a treasure within a ruin; not of air and earth; not of fire and water; a sea without bounds. He has a hundred moons and skies and suns. He is wise through universal truth -not a scholar from a book."

On Raymond Peat's axiom "Perceive, think, act."

"When people start thinking about the things in their life that can be changed, they are exercising aspects of their organism that had been atrophied by being in an authoritarian culture. Authoritarians talk about protocols, but the only valid ‘protocol’ would be something like ‘perceive, think, act.’”

Roald Dahl on it ... you can imagine what:

IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK - HE ONLY SEES!

P., rest (probably not!) in peace!

-"Do you want me to give you kiss,
or slap in the face?"
- "Kiss."
"That's your problem."