(photo R Angert)
The Voice of the Inner Teacher
Parker Palmer asks us “Do you have experiences of listening for, hearing, and having to deal with ‘the voice of the inner teacher’? If so, can you tell a story or two about those moments—about how they have felt and what they have meant in your life?”1
Growing up surrounded by formal education and taught to most value words in books and those from the teacher at the front of the room had a particular effect on me. It silenced the voice of the inner teacher that we travel the life journey with. The English language has metaphors for that voice – a gut feeling, a hunch, a leading, an inner voice or an intuition. And I sometimes acted upon them, but more often silenced that voice.
I found that pilgrimage moves that Inner Teacher’s voice to the front of the room, and grants me permission to acknowledge the words and act on them openly, even sharing them with others. My pilgrimages didn’t start with the Camino, but my awareness that I had been a pilgrim before became real during that long saunter across Spain when I had lots of time to listen to that Inner Teacher, act upon the words heard and consider the results.
Today I invite you to think about your own Inner Teacher voice before, during and after your pilgrimage and leave a comment or two with what you heard, learned and how you may have used those lessons as you returned ‘home’. Phil has been sharing this in the blog for years, now it is your turn.
Do you more readily respond to the Inner Teacher’s voice after walking a pilgrimage?
Have you heard the same lesson repeated over time? Did you respond to it?
I won’t reveal here any of my lessons heard and responded to so that I don’t keep you from posting your own, but I will add one or two in the comments in a few days.
Well, one little example: My Inner Teacher led me to write on this topic, and she only voiced it once a few days ago. I’ve learned to ‘Just Do It!’
In teachable love,
Ronaldo in Astorga, León
Many messages come from within…….
Be still and know that I Am God.
Looking Up is also very important.
Love that arrow in the sky.
With Gratitude.
As promised, here is one of my Inner Teacher lessons that I responded to and learned from.
As a director of a team of IT support professionals at a university I felt that we all needed to learn from the mistakes we individually made along life’s journey. I had been focusing on learning from my own mistakes, instead of hiding them, for a few years.
So I incorporated a feature into staff meetings in which a team member would briefly describe a recent mistake they made in the workplace and shared what they learned from it. Of course, I had to go first as an example to the others. I had to pick a mistake I made at work that they might all have been affected by, unpack it and summarise the things I learned and then try to give an example of actually using the lesson learned. How difficult!
But it was well received, and I seldom had to ‘assign’ the Mistake Story speaker for the next meeting, people actually volunteered to do it. In this way we learned from the mistakes of others instead of having to make them ourselves. Most of the team members liked the idea of being rewarded for sharing their mistakes and the discussion surrounding the lessons learned sometimes took up the rest of the hour and even a group lunch after the meeting.
So the lesson from the inner Teacher that I responded to was “Learn from your mistakes!” and the follow-up one, once I got consistent with that, was “Share that with others!”
I was nervous presenting it at first, but it quickly became a popular part our meetings.
Ronaldo ~ thanks, good one. Felipé.